Slashdot Mirror
SuSE 7.3 vs XP
rutledjw writes: "This should be good for some flame wars. A story on HPWorld that I read about on NewsForge gives an interesting comparison between XP and Linux. I personally think the story wanders a little and wouldn't call it comprehensive, but it is interesting. It does point out a particular bottleneck in how the 2.4.x kernels handle asynchronous IO. Apparently this is being addressed in the 2.5 kernels..." It actually appears quite low-flame and balanced, and unlike some Linux vs. Windows comparisons, goes into decent detail rather than just glib generalizations.
Who cares which one is faster, or better, or more stable. Seriously. I just plain don't like Windows. I dare them to address that. I think I can sum it up: I was typing the other day... a window poped up. Something had happened. I inadvertantly hit enter (since I was already typing) and as a result, still don't know what the message said... Well, that and I lost what I was typing. The irritation factor was a 9.6.
Cygwin almost works... I use that at work. But it's all slow and icky. I've known for a million years that ext2 is slow, but I like that filesystem a shatload more than some of the faster ones... Mostly, I think that's because I know how it works. I can look it up. ls -l shows me a bit more under linux, ya know?
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
I guess you have to pick one, but RedHat, has a more Windows-esque hardware detection system. Hell I can yank out the video card and change it and on reboot the RedHat 7.2 machine will autodetect it and change the X config for it without asking for any technical information. something that SuSE, Mandrake and the likes dont have yet.
Granted a RedHAT install is really bloated compared to the others but if you want to compare apples to apples.....
The whole article could have used a second going over before it was released.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I didn't see any generalisations about GLib, and certainly no details on it.
A very fair assessment and a good article. One minor caveat - Can someone clarify this quote from the article?
"Another annoying gotcha for business users is the dropping of support for Netscape-style plug-in modules in the XP version of Internet Explorer 6.0. Just try to download a PDF file from any site on the Web. It's easy as long as you right-click on the link and choose the option to "Save target as." The alternative is to make Opera your default Web browser."
The last one or two versions of Acrobat Reader I've used have a little "save" button at the top of the toolbar that the PDF opens inside.
Any clue what they're referring to? Sounds like an interesting UI issue if it exists, but I wonder under what conditions it occurs.
OK, then we have only the article subject:
-Everyone who thinks XP is best post on the left.
-Everyone who thinks Linux suse with patch xxx.xx is just as fast post right.
-Everyone who thinks DMCA is bad post on an other article. 8)
By the way, the article loads, but some link on the page fails. just press cancel and the text is there. or disable images and it goes fine
Don't mod this up(i am already karma capped), just post a good mirror
------------
Home >
Publications >
HP World >
Lab Report
Volume 5 Issue 2
Wizards and Windows
XP and Linux Go Head
to Head on Two HP OmniBook 6000s
by Jack Fegreus
While releasing Windows NT 4.0,
Redmond's Hexenmeisters were already dreaming of code convergence
with Win9x. But such black magic often goes beyond what apprentice sorcerers can handle.
Long, long, long before that
upstart Harry Potter, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote "Der
Zauberlehrling," a poem about a sorcerer's apprentice. Just
over 100 years later, that poem would inspire Paul Dukas to compose
his tone poem, the "Sorcerer's Apprentice." And some
50 years after that, Walt Disney, Leopold Stokowski and Mickey
Mouse would forever immortalize the tale of the hapless student
of the black arts in Fantasia.
It's a tale now playing out in
real life with the release of Windows XP, which for the first
time extends the reach of Windows NT technology into the consumer
market via the Home Edition. Like all good Gothic tales, this
one begins with the protagonist being driven from his home in
a swirl of deep and murky politics. As the Hexenmeister of DEC
West walked away from the Prism debacle, he turned his attention to the even bigger mess with OS2 at Microsoft. Once again, the
wizard worked his magic, and there arose an extraordinary, modern
IT operating system that evolved into the utterly rock-solid
Windows 2000.
Nonetheless, the success and
extraordinary adoption of Windows NT technology by IT is hardly
resounding compared to the mass consumer market for games and
other entertainment. And so the keepers of Windows 9x lusted after the stability of Windows NT just as Goethe's sorcerer's apprentice longed for the power of his teacher.
The Linux revolution greatly
exacerbated the Windows 9x problem as the master's thesis project
of Linus Torvalds turned first into a cult phenomenon and then
into a successful commercial OS. Now, with open source rising
up as the business-alliance tsunami of the century, Microsoft
for the first time in a very long while faces both fundamental technology and business model challenges.
The Convergence Challenge
The technical challenges to converging
Win9x and WinNT were prodigious. Just consider the polar-opposite, fundamental assumptions that underpin both architectures. Win9x
was designed for just a single hardware architecture: Intel.
As a result, it was also designed to permit driver developers
to tweak the underlying hardware right down to the iron. And
that's just what all those makers of the video, sound and game
port cards that proliferate in the home computer space did.
On the other hand, Windows NT
was born in an IT market that was trying to rationalize an explosion
in RISC technology that seemed to be racing away from Intel.
The problem was not how to get down to the iron but, rather,
how to avoid getting near it. The solution was to create a Hardware
Abstraction Layer (HAL) that would prevent any software--especially
drivers--from directly manipulating physical hardware. In this
way, Windows NT could be easily ported to Alpha, MIPS and PowerPC,
as well as Intel. It is, therefore, not without some irony that
Windows XP runs on Intel, while Linux runs on everything from
handheld PDAs to classic mainframes.
So the first major technical
hurdle was to create a unified driver model. To gauge Microsoft's
success with this part of the challenge, OpenBench Labs set up
a pair of identical HP OmniBook 6000 systems, which are representative
of typical high-end business laptops. Each system was powered
by an Intel Pentium III CPU clocked at 700 MHz. Each was configured
with 256 MB of PC133 SDRAM and an IBM TravelStar Ultra ATA disk
drive. In addition, technicians further complicated the equation
by setting up three hardware configurations for each laptop:
standalone, a simple port-replicator dock and a fully equipped
dock with embedded SCSI and ATA adapters.
On one OmniBook 6000, lab technicians
installed Windows XP Pro, the successor to Windows 2000 Professional
for business client computers. On the other OmniBook 6000, they
installed SuSE Linux 7.3, which is the latest distribution from
SuSE and is built on the Linux 2.4.10 kernel and version 2.2.1
of the KDE desktop.
Good News for SuSE
This HP World Lab Report
will be looking at SuSE 7.3 and RedHat 7.2 in much greater detail
in a future review. For now, simply running the various OpenBench
Labs benchmark programs on each OS allowed technicians to gauge
how closely Linux and the open source business model have evolved
in providing OS distributions with equivalent performance at
a fraction of the cost.
As a side note, SuSE 7.3 installed
effortlessly and, more important, flawlessly on the OmniBook.
No need for an exhausting "installfest" with the latest
version of SuSE--if you have a DVD drive, the installation is
downright trivial.
A lot of this good news is a
direct result of a number of enhancements to YaST2, SuSE's configuration
tool. A number of the noteworthy additions include a Logical
Volume Manager for partitioning an active system and ISaX for carrying out windows configuration while the X Windows system
is active. (Microsoft has touted similar features in Windows
NT since the launch of the OS.) For IT, there is support for
a second journaling file system, JFS, as well as ReiserFS, which
has long been a SuSE staple. There is also a new module for software
RAID support. Not to slight home users--after all, the big seller
for Microsoft will be Windows XP Home--SuSE has included a setup
for TV cards and the automatic detection and configuration of
IDE-based CD burners.
CPU Benchmark
With both laptop systems configured,
lab personnel were ready to calibrate the OmniBook's base CPU,
memory and streaming I/O performance under each OS. Technicians began with their CPU benchmark, which executes 34 numerically
intensive kernels, both integer and floating point. The results
here were very much in line with OpenBench Labs' first tests
of the Linux 2.4 kernel near the beginning of the year.
At that time, HP found the performance
gap between Linux and Windows 2000 to have been closed to about
18 percent from previous observations, which had been in the
range of 20 to 25 percent. Once again, the difference between
the geometric means for the 34 kernels was on the order of 18 percent, with Windows XP Pro clocking in at 240 and SuSE 7.3
clocking in at 203. Nonetheless, within a 95 percent confidence
interval, performance was almost identical. This is a function
of more variability in performance among the 34 kernels when
run on Linux. The variability is especially prevalent on the
high end since a number of kernels execute significantly faster
on Linux than Windows XP.
On SuSE 7.3, technicians utilized
a logical volume formatted with the Reiser File System (ReiserFS),
which is a journaled, extent-based file system. In theory, a
journaled file system should have an edge in performance when
checking the file during boot-up and when issuing writes. Reads
are supposedly more vulnerable to degradation due to fragmentation
of the extents. Nonetheless, for small block transfers, Linux
now held an advantage over Windows XP Pro. For sequential disk
I/O, it was Windows XP Pro that rapidly converged on SuSE 7.3,
which delivered throughput on the order of 15 MB per second as
read sizes grew larger than 8 KB.
I/O Benchmark
The final benchmark characterizes
the system's capabilities for transaction-processing database
operations. The fundamental goal of the load benchmark is to
determine how many I/O requests per second a given disk subsystem
can reasonably support.
The OpenBench Labs' load benchmark
suite systematically launches an increasing number of I/O-intensive
daemon processes that read data in 8-KB blocks from a physical partition rather than from a file. I/O operations are performed on both hot-spot regions, which simulate database indices, and
randomly across the volume, which simulates a large database.
When the average access time of all of the processes exceeds
100 milliseconds, the I/O subsystem is deemed saturated and the
benchmark terminates with a report to the user.
As the graph shows, large volumes
of asynchronous I/O requests are currently a weakness in Linux
performance. On the OmniBook's simple ATA drive, Windows XP Pro
was able to deliver 70 I/Os per second with an average access
time of only 40 milliseconds. In comparison, Linux was able to deliver only about 32 I/Os per second. With hardware RAID and
storage on a SAN, this performance differential worsens dramatically.
The problem lies squarely within
the block I/O layer of the Linux kernel. In the current version
of the Linux kernel, 2.4.x, the I/O subsystem works with a single
spinlock, called io_request_lock. As a result, in a TP scenario
with hundreds of independent I/O requests queuing up, this spinlock serializes operations that have no dependencies and creates a
significant bottleneck.
This is all being addressed by
those working on the I/O subsystem in the 2.5 kernel now under
development. The new block I/O code eliminates the central spinlock
and provides each request queue with its own lock. In addition, the new kernel will work more with page structures, which can
be particularly advantageous when handling clustered requests
from the raw I/O layer.
The Dangers of Wizardry
The labs' experience in actually
using Windows XP Pro was not unlike that of Goethe's hapless
student. The problems all stemmed from Microsoft's "soft"
problem in converging Win9x with WinNT: How do you give naive
home users an OS as powerful as WinNT and expect them to properly configure and manage the system? The answer from Redmond's Zauberlehrlingen
was to create automatic wizards to take care of all the problems.
These wizards should work nicely in a simple SOHO environment;
however, in a complex, heterogeneous business network, they can become a very dangerous bunch.
A prime example of a wizard run
amuck is the upgraded Connect-to-the-Internet wizard. Once a
very innocuous fellow, this wizard has been put on steroids in
Windows XP. The new wizard looks for multiple Ethernet connections,
such as the built-in 100-Mbit port and the wireless Ethernet
PC Card that are in each OpenBench Labs OmniBook 6000. Once a wizard finds more than one NIC, the fun really starts. Without a moment's hesitation, the wizard assigns one address to all of the NICs and proceeds to bridge the offending LAN segments.
Imagine the effects of that cavalier action as the desktop PC
tries to build bridging tables for the LAN. On HP's network,
which has a number of Macs running AppleTalk in the art and production
departments, all of the Macs were instant goners.
While dramatic, that was the
least of the problems. At least that could be fixed by blowing
up the bridge. Not all of the wizardry was so easily reversible.
On each laptop, technicians had installed AT&T WorldNet for
dialup Internet connectivity while on the road. All configurations
were explicitly set to "Never dial," since most of
the time these systems are used in the office with a LAN connection. Unfortunately, Windows XP, quite unlike Windows 2000, treats
"Never dial" as merely a suggestion that can be ignored.
Whenever a networking application is launched, the OS may--or
may not--decide to launch the dialup application.
Another annoying gotcha for business
users is the dropping of support for Netscape-style plug-in modules
in the XP version of Internet Explorer 6.0. Just try to download
a PDF file from any site on the Web. It's easy as long as you right-click on the link and choose the option to "Save target as." The alternative is to make Opera your default Web browser.
Unfortunately there are even
more bundled add-ons, such as the home movie maker and the MS
Passport Messenger app, that make no sense whatever on a business
laptop and that you can't get rid of no matter how hard you try. Compounding the annoyance factor of these indelible programs
is the need to conserve disk space with Windows XP.
One of the really useful add-ons
for IT is the ability to checkpoint files under Windows XP. Once
again, however, there is a problem with introducing a sophisticated
IT tool to home users. Once again, XP is back to the mystical wizards. Worse yet, the checkpoint wizard, which should be on
steroids, is on sedatives. The only parameter that can be set
for this important function is the maximum amount of disk space
that will be made available for this feature to consume. When
the system creates checkpoints and when the system purges those
checkpoints is pure black magic on Windows XP.
Not-so-simple Solutions
For Goethe's young student, salvation
from the golem brooms came only upon the return of the great
sorcerer. Only the sorcerer knew how to stop the brooms in their
tracks. For Windows XP Pro users, the solution is not quite so
simple. To avoid the chaos of having a robust WinNT system that
is as quirky as Win9x, your best hope is to exorcise every automated
wizard that can be found.
That solution, however, raises
an intriguing issue concerning Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
for Windows versus open source systems. Until now, conventional
wisdom held that Windows wizards were a key factor in holding
down TCO by countering the initial licensing costs with lower
maintenance costs and lower skills requirements for the maintainers. OpenBench Labs' initial foray into the unconventional world of Windows XP puts that conventional wisdom about TCO into serious
question.
Home |
About Interex |
Press Room |
Volunteers |
Contact |
Media Info |
Management Services
©Copyright 2001 Interex.
All rights reserved.
Privacy Policy.
Contact the Webmaster.
*
The 7.2 SuSE Distribution had definite problems. At our company, we kept all of our servers at 7.1, after hearing about and then experiencing problems with upgrades and installs with 7.2.
:-)
Because we waited a bit, and did some tests first, we weren't bitten.
However, seeing these kind of "not quite ready for prime time" errors ALMOST soured us on SuSE. Almost.
We concluded that from time to time _every_ distribution is going to have a less than stellar release, and well, that's just life and business. We concluded that we'd follow the same cautious pattern where 7.3 was concerned when it came out.
When 7.3 was released, we purchased it and did a bit of initial testing. We waited until it was available via rsync from the major mirrors and set up an in-house mirror of the 7.3 tree, and waited a bit longer to allow many more users to install from the ftp sites. Then we waited to see what kind of horror stories about installs/upgrades would show up on the SuSE mailing lists or the usenet news groups. There were very few.
We upgraded most of our main servers to 7.3, all of our workstations, and so far, everything's been running _really_ nicely.
Now for the fun part: Using VMWare 3.0 Workstation for Linux, we can run Windows operating systems like Windows 2000 Professional or Windows XP Professional if that's what a project we're working on for a client calls for. We refer to it as "Windows, in Jail", complete with the jokes to "Hi Dad, I'm in Jail" from the Was-Not-Was song.
For us, it can be SuSE 7.3 and XP at the same time, but we let Linux control the underpinnings.
Oh: Tip to those wanting to go this route: Use the IDE-SCSI module, and configure your CDRom and DVD-Rom drives as SCSI drives and access them as virtual SCSI devices in Raw mode. This solves the infuriating problem of horridly slow access to the drives under VMWare when accessing drives in raw mode.
As the battle lines are drawen between the Linux and Microsoft armies I would like to offer our new range of services.
Now in stock are our extensive range of pitchforks, which may be ordered with the Tux logo, Microsoft logo, or if you're in the wrong group BSD logo.
Additionally if you order 5 or more pitchforks we will throw in our newest release of "Flaming and Trolling in the Modern Computer Society".
Our final special offer, exclusivly reserved for moderators who are kind to this message is to go round to the zealot of your choice's house, build a huge bonfire and burn them at the stake.
WinLux inc : Making religous wars more fun
Well said. I have to admit, when I moved to Suse7.3 about six months ago, I really missed the handy-dandy pop-o-matic wizards that made Win98 such a no-brainer. It was a bitch having to figure everything out from scratch, with FAQ's either stopping too low down the clue scale or starting too high. I very nearly gave up (as I had done with RedHat 6.x a while back), but I stuck with it, and now I'm starting to get a clue.
Then two months ago, I upgraded from Win98SE to WinXP on another machine. I realised that I was suffering Linux cognitive dissonance (overvaluing the utility of it simply because it was hard to learn), and resolved to come to XP with an open mind. I was particularly looking forward to returning to the "one way to do it, it's our way, and we'll do it for you", which (be honest) is what Jane Homebody or Garry Gameplayer(me on that machine) really needs.
But oh dear. What's with the vile animated crap? How do I turn it off? Stop asking me if I want a passport account. Where's the network info? STOP ASKING ME IF I WANT A PASSPORT ACCOUNT. OK, I've set up TCP/IP, but how do I change the workgroup, it's not on the identification tab any more? STOP ASKING ME IF I WANT A PASSPORT ACCOUNT. Where's my single click interface? Hey, I thought I told you to stop animating those menus. No, I've already set up TCP/IP, stop asking me if I want to set up a connection to the internet. It's right there! STOP ASKING ME IF I WANT A PASSPORT ACCOUNT!
Even coming from Win98SE, it took me a long time to get WinXP set up the way I wanted it. If I'd come in cold, it would have been much worse, because I wouldn't even have known the right questions to ask. In all honesty, it's still a little easier than KDE on SuSE7.3, but it's not much easier. The gap has narrowed significantly, and - significantly - it's narrowing from both ends. Linux distros are getting better, but Windows really has got worse.
By trying to hide the inescapable fact that you do need to know what you're doing with WinXP (as you need to know with Linux), Microsoft has actually made it harder for those who do actually have a clue to drive it. How curious.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Do you still carry the Basket-o-rott'n-fruit? The three I bought from you at last year's emacs-vi-off were the best purchace I made all year!
-- MarkusQ
SuSE's success is based on the distribution's quantity, not its quality. A few years ago, my coworkers and I made industrial servers based on
SuSE.
Very soon it was quite clear that you can't rely on any release of SuSE's distributions. Good choices in 1998/1999 were 5.3 and 6.2, in between that there was a major libc change (6.0 to 6.1) which messed everything up.
My nowadays coworkers tried SuSE 6.4 to 7.3, with especially the 7.3 sucking hell. They complained about (GNU/)Linux being slower on a P800 than Windoze on a P100. As I know that in such case something must be wrong, I checked it. After startup, "updatedb" was running, eating plenty of system ressources away from the user's frontend while indexing a 20 GB harddisk. After about 20 minutes ("updatedb" was still running), the user gave up and rebooted into Windoze... After me stopping that job, the box was about as fast as it is on Redmondware.
Our old file servers still run SuSE (dunno which version), with the system being about in the same state when the box was installed. No matter how easy it could be to upgrade the packages to current versions, nobody dares to risk fscking up a box with inconsistent packages obtained through auto-upgrade.
Now I'm using Debian and the problems are gone. You can rely on _any_ release, that is, from the stable (Potato) branch and in most cases from testing (Woody). Even the Unstable branch is more consistent than some SuSE distributions I used to play with. Debian is more difficult to install than SuSE, but it is much more easier to maintain if you know what to do.
People migrating from SuSE to Debian is only bad for SuSE, but people migrating vom SuSE to Windoze is bad for us all.
I am not sure where these comparisons are going.
_ __
Each major operating system has its advantages and disadvantages depending on how it is implemented.
Listen there is no way I would want to move a brigade of secretaries over to Linux. I remember how much trouble my wife's law firm had getting those folks off of WordPerfect 5.2 for god's sake!
However, if I want a solid inexpensive server with lots of GUI tools to help me set things up then I go with Linux any day of the week. If I have a bunch of sysadmins, developers and geeks and I want to stop the endless bitching over the limits of WinNT as a desktop environment I tell them to install linux on their own and don't call IT when they screw it up. They love it. They get all the power they want and the corporate IT boys get a whole group of people they can tell to screw off when they call in for support.
Each OS has its own set of issues and strengths. Listen, if I had a rich aunt who never used a computer before and wanted to get on the internet I would tell her to get a mac.
Everything has its place. The trick is for Linux to clue in on its target audience of small server implementations and geek IT desktops.
_______________________________________________
ACK
I can't read the article (it's slashdotted), but there's something about Windows (specially XP) that I rarely hear people talk about: it uses outrageous amounts of RAM. Yes, RAM is cheap, but I find it extremely suspicious when simple applications consume so many resources.
I have 128 MB of RAM and with Linux it's enough for everything I need, _including_ Mozilla (which as we all know, can use a lot of memory).
I find it ludicrous that I can't even boot XP without swapping and it takes forever to open up apps like the media player. Should I face this with a smile and say "well, I'm at fault because 128 MB of RAM clearly isn't enough"?
I can't bring myself to respect an OS which needs this many resources to do nothing. Yet I know people with 64 MB of RAM who praise XP in favor of Linux. I firmly believe that they either don't use their computers for anything productive or they lie.
I've got two computers at home and I currently use both Linux (Mandrake 8.1) and Windows XP Home. I need both boxes to accomplish what I need to do.
The Windows box is still a necessity. I have a 4 year old who likes educational games and without Windows, they simply don't run. Windows XP has also proven very adept at guiding my non-techie wife through moving pictures between the digital camera and the hard drive. XP is a huge improvement over ME in both stability and capability. Before, emailing pictures from the digital camera was an ordeal for her. Now, she just selects the picture out of a "filmstrip" view and clicks "Email the Picture". XP automatically resizes it for her (if desired) and attaches it to an email in her preferred email client.
I also wouldn't do without Linux. I use it as a firewall/proxy/Samba server and occasionally run a webserver on it with DHCP. Windows doesn't come close to being as capable for these services on my home network. I use the Linux box whenever I want to automate something through scripting or to use the superb open source utilities that come preinstalled. Got to automatically crop a bunch of pictures to a specific file size, hard to beat Imagemagik from the command line on Linux. Please don't ask me to get it working on XP.
I don't think of it as an either or. I look forward to the day when Linux can meet all my needs. I've long since given up or even looking forward to the day when Windows can.
I don't think they are interrested in changing the video chip
But I guess the main reason for SuSE is that they have some kind of agreement with SuSE.
Besides, IIRC they also mention something about everything being recognized directly by the SuSE install whereas there were some glitches with Red Hat...
Black holes occur when God divides by zero.
It actually appears quite low-flame and balanced, and unlike some Linux vs. Windows comparisons, goes into decent detail rather than just glib generalizations.
/.?
So why exactly is this story on
=)
We've known IE6 and IE55SP2 don't support Netscape sytle plugins for months. That's old news.
There are two ways to view a PDF in IE. Through Plugins, which open the PDF inline (in the browser window), and through MIME Types, which opens the associated application. Both work with IE6/XP today. For a short time it didn't while Adobe worked to create the ActiveX plugin. While the plugin was not available, you had use the MIME type to open the file in the associated application. No big deal, you click on the link and it opens the file in Acrobat Reader outside IE. It is pretty simple, and I don't believe anyone trying to compare XP and Linux would get slipped up by something as easy as that.
What is he talking about? My guess is he's saying you can't just save PDFs easily to the hard drive without right-clicking. As if you had to download a lot of PDFs from a website, but not actually have to open them and clicking "save" or right clicking the link and hitting "save as". I don't know, sounds pretty lame to me. Either that or there was a legitimate complaint that got hacked to this nonsense paragraph by the editor.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.