Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 22 Feb 2003 14:44:18 -0800 | From | Ben Greear <> | Subject | Re: Minutes from Feb 21 LSE Call |
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Mark Hahn wrote: >>OK, so now you've slid from talking about PCs to 2-way to 4-way ... >>perhaps because your original arguement was fatally flawed. > > > oh, come on. the issue is whether memory is fast and flat. > most "scalability" efforts are mainly trying to code around the fact > that any ccNUMA (and most 4-ways) is going to be slow/bumpy. > it is reasonable to worry that optimizations for imbalanced machines > will hurt "normal" ones. is it worth hurting uni by 5% to give > a 50% speedup to IBM's 32-way? I think not, simply because > low-end machines are more important to Linux. > > the best way to kill Linux is to turn it into an OS best suited > for $6+-digit machines.
Linux has a key feature that most other OS's lack: It can (easily, and by all) be recompiled for a particular architecture. So, there is no particular reason why optimizing for a high-end system has to kill performance on uni-processor machines.
For instance, don't locks simply get compiled away to nothing on uni-processor machines?
-- Ben Greear <greearb@candelatech.com> <Ben_Greear AT excite.com> President of Candela Technologies Inc http://www.candelatech.com ScryMUD: http://scry.wanfear.com http://scry.wanfear.com/~greear
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