Slashdot Mirror
Debate on Linux Virtual Memory Handling
xturnip sent us a good piece running over at Byte about Linux's VM. Somewhat more technical then the stuff we usually see online, this one talks about different VM systems, and the egos in the kernel. Its worth a read.
Where is the moderation fairy? Why does she only give me dust when there are lame stories to moderate. Please sprinkle thy dust into my hands so that I may bless this post.
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
That company (mine, unfortunately) is most likely going out of business soon. So don't give me this crap that ego only adversely affects Open Source projects.
Gee, it's sad and all, but it's too bad you don't work for Microsoft...
*runs
MrC was heavily optimized for PPC by people who spent years working on it and not having to worry about any other architecture (except maybe m68k).
GCC is a large compiler projects w/ frontends for many languages and backends for an obscene # of platforms.
Over the years, both the frontends and backends of GCC have steadily improved. Just as Intel has contributed code or expertise for the x86 backend, certainly anyone who's worked on Apple's compilers is welcome to send patches to the GCC maintainers to improve PPC performance (though whether or not Apple lawyers would have something to say about that might complicate the issue).
And hey; if you feel so passionate about it, why don't you code up some test programs, compare the assembler output, and mail the code & generated results to the GCC team so that they know where improvement is needed: oh, but wait; it *is* much easier just to bitch on slashdot, isn't it?
On second thought, damn why can't all these volunteer programmers do a better job of making my life easier without any help from me...
Another area of Linux with problems (albeit mostly non-kernel related) is the threading model. For Christ's sake, grow up. "We can do kernel context switches fast enough for 1:1 threading model!". Pure hubris. Linux is unusable for any serious Java development.