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NetBSD Focuses On Scalability
An anonymous reader writes "Felix von Leitner recently performed some benchmarks (previous story) for a talk about scalable network programming he held at Linux Kongress 2003. The winners in this scalability lineup were Linux and FreeBSD 5, followed by NetBSD and finally OpenBSD.
What's interesting is that in only two weeks time the NetBSD team made dramatic improvements. Felix performed his benchmarks again and the results are nothing short of astonishing. NetBSD now has better scalability than FreeBSD." Read on for a list of improvements.
the submitter lists these changes:
- socket: previously O(n), now O(1).
- bind: greatly improved, but still O(n). Much less steep, though.
- fork: a modest O(n) for dynamically linked programs, O(1) for statically linked.
- mmap: a bad O(n) before, now O(1) with a small O(n) shadow.
- touch after mmap: a bad strange graph in 1.6.1, a modest O(n) a week ago, now O(1).
- http request latency: previously O(n), now O(1)
This is a very good job from the NetBSD team! I hope to see more benchmarks and more improvement for a great OS like NetBSD."
But does it support more than one CPU yet?
Colour me cynical, but just maybe the improvements are targeted to produce a better benchmark rather than broader scalability.
Tell me I'm wrong.
Kids today are tyrants. They contradict their parent, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers. - Socrates 400 BC
It's some of the best source code I've ever looked at. As far as having consistantly good source code, it whoops Linux. I really tried to get my operating systems class teacher to use it instead of Linux, because of it's clean design. He decided to use QNX instead. WTF~?
Anyway if you've never tried NetBSD, I think you should. At least get it installed and compile a kernel. It's a good learning experience. Plus it's been ported to every fsking hardware platform ever (just about.)
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
I run GNU on my machines. I'm not picky about kernels.
If only they could get support from nvidia for my controler ... This will be better than all other improvement
The most beautiful code for the most beautiful OS.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
What the hell is this supposed to mean? Either you are O(1) or you are O(n) - what is "small O(n) shadow" mean?
www.eFax.com are spammers
What, they want to buy a lot of cemeteries?
The benchmark hardware is a Dell Inspiron 8000 with a 900 MHz Pentium 3 and 256 MB RAM.
SMP should change nothing on this kind of hardware and don't explain why OpenBSD performe poorly.
It is official; RedHat confirms: Linux is dying
One more crippling bombshell devastated lonely beleaguered Linux fanboys everywhere RedHat confirmed that they have killed Linux, finally putting it out of its misery. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has the most usage, longest uptimes, and is only accelerating in market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Linux is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Linux's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Linux faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Linux because Linux is dying. Things are looking very bad for Linux. As many of us are already aware, Linux continues to lose market share and will only accelerate now that RedHat has killed it. Red ink flows from RedHat like a river of blood.
I'd like to play around more with NetBSD if it can produce results like this. Did the author just install an "off the shelf" version of 1.6.1 or did he have to apply 100 pre-alpha patches from some guy named Joe in order to get this performance?
The O(N) shadow statement is a sufficient statement of O(N) behaviour for the big O pedants. I looked at the graph, and I vote we keep the wording as it was.
O notation is overrated. Sorting is always described as O(N*log N), but for any practical architecture using a radix sort with L1/L2 cache locality, replace log N with the constant factor of 3 or 4. A million cache local buckets can radix sort 10^30 elements in 3 log N time.
Using all of main memory as your bucket store, I'd guess you could sort every proton in the known universe in 8 passes. So what exactly is that log N term trying to tell us?
It is common knowledge that *BSD is dying. Everyone knows that ever hapless *BSD is mired in an irrecoverable and mortifying tangle of fatal trouble. It is perhaps anybody's guess as to which *BSD is the worst off of an admittedly suffering *BSD community. The numbers continue to decline for *BSD but FreeBSD may be hurting the most. Look at the numbers. The erosion of user base for FreeBSD continues in a head spinning downward spiral.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of BSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major marketing surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among hobbyist dilettante dabblers. In truth, for all practical purposes *BSD is already dead. It is a dead man walking.
Fact: *BSD is dying
I can really only warn of using OpenBSD for scalable network servers.
...again, I would advise against using OpenBSD for scalable network servers.
r e_dog_hosting_most_reliable_hosting_company_site_d uring_october.html
Don't use OpenBSD for network servers.
If you are using OpenBSD, you should move away now.
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2003/11/02/secu
vodka, straight up, thank you!
life: was 0 now O(-1)
grandma_use: still at 0
games_api: still at O(n^-3)
GO LINUX!
What We Can Learn From BSD
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0
Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.
Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.
These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.
As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.
Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.
The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.
Since the author actually reads the slashdot comments, I've a little question.
I'm no real kernel hacker, so I could be totally off, but:
Are all OSes located on the same part of the (same) HD? This because linear performance probably scales linear with the cylinder the OS partitions is on.
The Year of Our Lord 2003 has been a particularly bad year for the "B"s,
- Bob Hope
- Buddy Ebsen
- Buddy Hackett
- Barry White
- BSD
This honored list of dead is but a small token of adieu from the many fans of the deceased.These dead were truly some American Icons. They will be missed.
In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even MicroEmacs is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various BSD machines, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a BSD box that has run faster than its Windows counterpart, despite the BSD machine's faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 800 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that BSD is a "superior" machine.
BSD addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a BSD over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
If for example you are talking about a function:
// stupid useless algorithm
int calc_result(int a, int b)
{
for (ii=0; iia; ii++) b *= b;
}
You might say that it is linear in terms of a.
But a has a fixed range so it is actually constant time.
Big-O notation is nice in theory and nice in practice when you are willing to not be too precise, but if you try and make everything exact it just doesn't make sense on real finite-sized computers.
Limbaugh recently celebrated his 15th year in radio and is also the industry's biggest star, garnering top ratings for many of the 650 stations that run his three-hour afternoon talk show and boasting 20 million listeners every week. But in early October, the radio commentator suffered some temporary professional and personal reverses.
The talk show host's name came up Tuesday morning during a conference call discussing third-quarter earnings at Clear Channel Communications, the huge radio station owner that also owns the Premiere Radio Networks unit that produces Limbaugh's show. A Clear Channel executive said that Limbaugh should be out of the hospital within seven to 10 days and that a full recovery is expected.
A Clear Channel spokeswoman said late Tuesday that Limbaugh would return to the airwaves on Nov. 17. Guest hosts have been filling in while Limbaugh was away.
John Hogan, chief executive officer of Clear Channel Radio, said there hasn't been much of a financial fallout since Limbaugh has been away. No stations have left the fold and no advertisers have dropped either, Hogan said.
"During his absence, we have maintained 100 percent of our affiliate base, and we have maintained our advertiser base," Hogan said. "This is an unfortunate turn of events for Rush, but our advertisers and our affiliate base have remained firmly behind him and we look forward to his return in the near future."
Keesh is nothing more than a pitiful Linux fanboy who forgot to check the "post anonymously" option. We have another Linux fanboy to flame, folks. Bring on the torches!
Is that you, keesh? You're pathetic!
BSD you grow in the ghetto, living second rate
And your eyes will sing a song of deep hate.
The places you play and where you stay
Looks like one great big alley way.
You'll admire all the numberbook takers,
Thugs, BSD pimps and pushers, and the big money makers.
The Failure of *BSD
Of course we can all agree that BSD is a failure, but why did BSD fail Once you get past the fact that BSD is fragmented between a myriad of incompatible kernels, there is the historical record of failure and of failed operating systems. BSD experienced moderate success about 15 years ago in academic circles. Since then it has been in steady decline. We all know BSD keeps losing market share but why Is it the problematic personalities of many of the key players Or is it larger than their troubled personalities
The record is clear on one thing no operating system has ever come back from the grave. Efforts to resuscitate BSD are one step away from spiritualists wishing to communicate with the dead. As the situation grows more desperate for the adherents of this doomed OS, the sorrow takes hold. An unremitting gloom hangs like a death shroud over a once hopeful BSD community. The hope is gone; a mournful nostalgia has settled in. Now is the end time for BSD.
Oct. 23 -- BSD resumed receiving life-sustaining care yesterday in a
Florida hospital room, but many experts said there is virtually no hope
that it will ever recover, despite it fan boy's desperate hopes.
"IF IT'S over a year, BSD's not ever going to get up," said Fred Plum, a
professor emeritus at Weill Cornell College in New York. "You'd just
don't see it. It just doesn't happen."
BSD, 39, has been in a persistent vegetative
state since its heart stopped for unknown reasons in 1990. A feeding
tube in BSD's stomach was removed this past Wednesday after its husband,
Theo De Ratt, who said his wife had told him she (BSD) would not want to
be kept alive under such circumstances, won a long series of court
battles to have life-sustaining nourishment withdrawn so she (BSD) could
die.
...wake me up when I can take NetBSD v1.7 and run it on my VAXstation 3100 with 8MB of memory like I can with v1.5.1
NetBSD is starting (not yet, but close) to become dangerously close to the precipice of being Bloatware(*)
First on my list to replace is GCC which has ballooned in size way way too much for the "features" that have been recently included.
TDz.
(*Bloatware is a TM of Microsoft corp)
"Do not stand at my hard disk and forever weep.
I am not there; I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn's rain.
When you reboot in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my hard disk and forever cry.
I am not there. "
Sure, we all know that *BSD is a failure, but why? Why did *BSD fail? Once you get past the fact that *BSD is fragmented between a myriad of incompatible kernels, there is the historical record of failure and of failed operating systems. *BSD experienced moderate success about 15 years ago in academic circles. Since then it has been in steady decline. We all know *BSD keeps losing market share but why? Is it the problematic personalities of many of the key players? Or is it larger than their troubled personas?
The record is clear on one thing: no operating system has ever come back from the grave. Efforts to resuscitate *BSD are one step away from spiritualists wishing to communicate with the dead. As the situation grows more desperate for the adherents of this doomed OS, the sorrow takes hold. An unremitting gloom hangs like a death shroud over a once hopeful *BSD community. The hope is gone; a mournful nostalgia has settled in. Now is the end time for *BSD.
Elegy For *BSD
I am a *BSD user
and I try hard to be brave
That is a tall order
*BSD's foot is in the grave.
I tap at my toy keyboard
and whistle a happy tune
but keeping happy's so hard,
*BSD died so soon.
Each day I wake and softly sob
Nightfall finds me crying
Not only am I a zit faced slob
but *BSD is dying.
It is perhaps anybody's guess as to which *BSD is the worst off of an admittedly suffering *BSD community. The numbers continue to decline for *BSD but FreeBSD may be hurting the most. Look at the numbers. The erosion of user base for FreeBSD continues in a head spinning downward spiral.
Consider that because of the many troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
Every major marketing survey has shown that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are infinitesimally dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among hobbyist dilettante dabblers. In truth, for all practical purposes *BSD is already dead. It is a dead man walking.
This should read as FreeBSD in the FreeBSD section..
>>>
As for NetBSD, I plotted the graphs for 4.9 against the graphs for 5.1-CURRENT. Here are the results:
Or the NetBSD guys looked at all of Ingo Molnar's kernel hacks and incorporated the same logic. 2 weeks to implement all these things is an awfully short period of time, IF YOU ARE DOING THE HEAVY LIFTING OF THE DESIGN. Implementing someone else's algorithm is much easier.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
What We Can Learn From BSD
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0
Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.
Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.
These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.
As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.
Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.
The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains ever more market share and as BSD sinks yet deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.
The *BSD Wailing Song
What's left for me to see
In my ship I sailed so far
What can the answer be
Don't know what the questions are.
And after all I've done
Still I cannot feel the sun
Tell me save me
In the end our lost souls must repent.
I must know it is for certain
Can it be the final curtain
As long as the wind will blow
I'll be searching high and low.
Who knows what's really true
They say the end is so near
Why are we all so cruel
We just fill ourselves with fear.
And heaven and hell will turn
All that we love shall burn
Hear me trust me
In the end our lost sould must repent.
I must know it is for certain
Can it be the final curtain
As long as the wind will blow
I'll be searching high and low
Final curtain
Final curtain
me
This is the sort of flaming that gives the Coward family a bad name. Read the frequently asked questions for OpenBSD. This is isue 8.18. In any case, why would this issue cause you to swear about the OS? Try it and see what you think. I found it to be very stable. I didn't use it in a situation that would tax its scalaiblity. The world is full of servers that are used at 10% of capacity, but are hit by viruses and other attacks. For these servers, OpenBSD would be great. Besides, there is pretty good cross fertilizaton between the BSDs. If the others can move from O(n) to O(1), I'll bet the OpenBSD folks can do it too. It just may take them a while to do a full security audit of the code.
Think global, act loco
BSD is dead. Bury it in quicklime; bury it deep. It's starting to stink.
This improvement is the best possible answer to those who moaned that the benchmark was inappropriate, not a fair comparison, etc.
Well done to everyone at NetBSD who helped with the improvements, and well done to Felix for performing the benchmark!
The record is clear on one thing: no operating system has ever come back from the grave. Efforts to resuscitate *BSD are one step away from spiritualists wishing to communicate with the dead. As the situation grows more desperate for the adherents of this doomed OS, the sorrow takes hold. An unremitting gloom hangs like a death shroud over a once hopeful *BSD community. The hope is gone; a mournful nostalgia has settled in. Now is the end time for *BSD.