Byte Benchmarks Various Linux Trees

urbanjunkie writes: "Moshe Bar has an interesting article, essentially benchmarking the standard kernel (with aa VM) against the -ac kernel (with Rik's VM)." He also raises some very interesting points about how patches (and entire development trees) interact.

Comments

Re:Pournelle ?

[netringer]

I always thought he's a science-fiction author?

He is.

He also is(was?) the author of the "User's Column" in BYTE magazine.

I haven't seen nor heard of him in the last decade, although I did talk to him on the phone once. (I did tech support and called him back.)

Re:Pournelle ?

[(outer-limits)]

I once tried to read one of Jerry Pournelles books, and found it to be totally inane, guilleles, pontificating and absurd, and that was just the first three pages. It's basic premise was that earth was in a new ice age and everyone was freezing to death, but the greenies were still banning the use of hydrocarbons to warm the earth up using the greenhouse effect. Talk about trying to have your cake and eat it too! One the one hand he is saying that the greenhouse effect is real because it would solve the problem of the ice age, on the other he is saying the greenies are to blame. Now, at present, we have the real possibility, despite all the debate, of a greenhouse effect induced heating of the earth, and no indication of an ice age. He takes this concept and turns it on its head.

No wonder his computers never work. I read his column every month just to have a good laugh at how his latest freebie has shat itself because he doesn't know how to set it up, and then gets some poor support guy from the company that gave it to him, (in between plugging his wifes reading program and his sons latest business venture), to get out to his place over the weekend to fix it up.

At the same time, he never stops praising the free enterprise shambles that can't give him broadband in the middle of Hollywood.

Then he signs off on his latest friends book about how the white people are better than non-whites, and how America should just nuke the rest of the world, after it has finished up using all the oil that is there.

Re:what's the point?

[Arandir]

I'm using FreeBSD as a desktop OS at home and as a workstation at work. It's simply great!

There are only two advantages I see to Linux that makes it a better "desktop" OS. First, they put DRI in the kernel. They're working on this now for FreeBSD, but there's a lot of resistance to keep userland stuff out of kernelland. If all you care about is running games, then FreeBSD is not it. Go get a PS2 or an XBox.

Second, the popularity of Linux gives it a greater pool of developers to draw from. So Linux gets new device drivers faster. But you still will *not* get Linux shoehorned into this week's premium super buy at CompUSA. With Linux you have to wait around three months to get a driver for brand new hardware. With FreeBSD you have to wait about six months. If you buy computers more often than once every six months, stick with Linux. As for myself, I had no problems with FreeBSD on a stock Dell Optiplex GX240.

In terms of desktop software, don't worry a bit about it. They're the same on both platforms. Identical. Staroffice, GNOME, KDE, Xmms, Gimp, Mozilla, etc.

A suggestion

[nusuth]

I can't answer the kernel related part of your question, however a possible workaround is forcing future reads from active pages by preaccessing them. E.g, before starting on processing [N,N+K) cluster, read value(s) of N+K, N+2K, N+3K up to N+JK and write them back. For a suitable K,J pair, you should experience linear performance drop. A K=8000 and J=1 sounds reasonable to me.

&ltspeculation> AFAIK kernel uses a hairy buddy system (but I did not check that myself), if that is the case, not whole memory is accessible in an arbitrary allocation sequence. So your analysis of exceeding 1024Megs of memory by less than 10 Megs is incorrect. You have to allocate progressively smaller page sizes that follow fibinocci(sp) series (or something like that, see your local kernel hacker for more info) if you want whole your data in memory. &lt/Speculation>

Re:Pournelle ?-fiction.

[(outer-limits)]

Try this, or his support of the bell curve .

How can you take a guy seriously when he writes a book in which science fiction writers are guys who save earth from an alien invasion.

His knowledge of history is woeful as he does not appear to have heard of the Marshall plan. Without that, we would have had WWIII already, and with one after WWI, maybe no WWII.