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Open Source OS Benchmarking Competition
BenchmarkingFreak writes "OSnews is running a story about a new benchmarking competition: OSU Open Source Lab wanted to take the concept of benchmarking a little bit further with the Beaver Challenge 2004. In this competition they will be allowing a community of experts in each OS to tweak their configurations to ensure maximum performance. And they are running it all on wicked machines, just imagine... well you know."
* Debian GNU/Linux
* Fedora Linux
* FreeBSD
* Gentoo Linux
* NetBSD
* OpenBSD
* Red Hat Linux
* Slackware Linux
* SuSE GNU/Linux
Where's Mandrake?
First a story about screws, now a story about beavers. Apparently the /. crew had a slow weekend.
Anybody that says "R0X0red" should be locked in a porta potty, rolled down a hill, and sprayed with bullets.
Will they be benchmarking database performance, GCC compiling speed, I took at look at the methodology page and it wasn't particularly specific.
blazing saddles is one of the best movies ever!
It will be decided once and for all that Gentoo offers no discernable advantage over more conventional distros. At which point, Gentoo-zealots will only have portage to pull in converts.
For me, that's enough. Portage doesn't have *half* the dependency problems of apt, or up2date. I was a long time RedHat user, and I've tinkered with Debian here and there (can't stand it actually). But now I'm a certified Gentoo Zealot because of portage alone.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
This is a really neat idea, and it's a long time coming; however, I wouldn't expect overly divergent results among Linux distributions. Afterall, they're all going to use the latest 2.4 and 2.6 kernel and comparable glibc versions(with maybe the exception of Debian), so the only speed difference should be in the compiler flags used to build the packages. I'm not trying to negate the coolness of this competition because it should give a good measure of performance between the BSD distros VS Linux distros, but don't be surprised when the Linux distros all show comparable results. As a footnote, I do expect Gentoo to come in the lead of the Linux distros having tried them all and found it the fastest in empircal testing...
A musician without the RIAA, is like a fish without a bicycle.
I hear they all take vacation after the superbowl!
How do I keep track of people who are fingering
Good idea! And since you just said, it, why don't you go first?
Ron Paul 2012
Mandrake is more of a "user friendly" distro then a performance optimized distribution. Someone might add Mandrake to the list, but it's not as tightly configured as say Gentoo and I can't imagine what purpose it would be to add it to the competition except for just representation.
If they really wanted to make it a good competition, they would award beaver to the winner. That would get them fired up.
Maybe, maybe not.. that's the point of this exercise. Each distro gets a chance to optimize as much as possible. The nice thing about is everyone has to share what they did to make it faster... As a debian user, I can't wait to see what they do..
If you dislike Red Hat and Debian so much that you are willing to use Gentoo just to avoid their god-awful package systems, you should try NetBSD or FreeBSD. Pkgsrc (NetBSD)/Ports (FreeBSD) is the best package system around -- try it and see what it's like to use a modern software management system.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
Given OSNews' recent penchant for poorly-done benchmarks (e.g. 1, 2), I'm glad to see them run an article about someone else's (hopefully well-done) testing. By having expert teams who know what they're doing tweak the configurations, this should be a much more representative result. Hopefully OSNews will learn some methodology from these guys...
"You can never have too many elephants on your team."
With all this talk of beavers and tweaking i might just have to go out and catch me some hot case porn.. Newegg Here i come!
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
The only way to get real world benchmark results would be to distribute the benchmarks setiathome style and then do some funky statitical analysis. But you'd also need a way to verify the actual hardware used for each test.
Otherwise, we still end up with data that needs to be heavily interpreted to get any take on what will happen in production on any given hardware.
Oh yeah, not to mention that for real world production, performance is also dependant on maintainability, uptime and a variety of other factors.
Still, this will result in a bunch of pretty graphs and nice rants and raves and dick waving for years to come, even though the data will only be good for one given point in time, for one given hardware platform, for one given configuration.
If Linux wins, the BSD snobs will have a field day babbling and flaming about how unfair the contest was.
Sure buddy. And if Santy Claus comes a-jumping down the chimney, you'll get the BB gun you always wanted.
I don't think it's all about a winner or a loser. As some others have pointed out each distro has it's quirks. This will show raw speed, as well as how it was accomplished, but there are plenty of other reasons to pick one over the other... Preference of package management, security, easy of maintaince. setup time etc and so forth. I personaly can't wait to see how this turns out...
This is daft!
It's like me choosing a Renault over a Jaguar just because they woop their ass in Formula 1. Tweaking the OS on a souped up server is not the same as using an out of the box distro on bog standard hardware.
What's the bet the 'tweaking' involves recompiling every component with hardware optimised CFLAGS etc.?
They will use 2 GB of RAM.
At 896 MB and below, Linux can use some
extra optimizations. During kernel config,
you choose the "1 GB" option.
Above 8 GB, and especially around 32 GB,
you switch to the 4g/4g model. On very large
systems, FreeBSD won't even boot because
some data structures become too large for
the low memory area.
As a Linux developer, I prefer this:
a. one box with 768 MB
b. one box with 64 GB
Gentoo is definitely geared more to computer scientists and engineers who understand their target system as well as the applicable set of compilation options which might optimize performance. If you're personally not able to see a difference then by all means stick with something easier like slackware, red hat, or lindows.
hey capt. america, Gentoo basicly uses ports (PORTage hello).
Why not include Windows and perhaps others? I guess they wouldn't include non-open-source ones because it's a site about open source but I'd love to see the comparison. Have any other sites done that?
The brief writeup in the Guardian hinted that it may have been from autoerotic asphixiation. How the hell are we supposed to carry on with our lives, knowing that the guy who wrote The Growing Pains Theme Song is no longer with us? What's the point?
Comprison of various Linux distros (and of the 2.4 versus 2.6 kernel) is interesting. However, what is really lacking is an objective comparison of MS Windows Server 2003 versus Linux. I know Microsoft tries to prevent such benchmarking, but can they really enforce such a ban? It ought to be possible to find a team of Windows experts to tune Windows so the comparison is fair. Why not?
This is clearly a plot by Microsoft and SCO to destroy OSS! They couldn't beat any one of us, but if they get us to fight each other...
Personally I would like to see a corewar challenge where each OS team gets to write
apps that crash/dos/disable the others OS.
Last OS standing wins.
Like most men, I have been actively engaged in the Beaver Challenge since I was about 13 years old. I'm sad to say that other than a few phone numbers and some awkward dinner conversations, I haven't made any significant progress...
I have to confess to being more interested in the universality of the testing framework than any of the results. Whatever is done I hope it leads to some standards for future, lower profile but perhaps more useful benchmarks.
An accepted cross distro testing criteria would be nice.
ls
Dude, I know you're not supposed to read the story, but at least read the text you quoted.
This list is not final and if people want to ante in to try this with their favorite distro, let us know at bc2004 at osuosl dot org or in #beaverchallenge on the Freenode.net IRC network.
Note what's implied...
Please help metamoderate.
It means your system should be the fastest!
BSD is nice, but its not as friendly as Linux. And thats saying alot.
The difference between Linux and BSD is the same type of difference between Windows and Linux.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
Too bad Gentoo isn't the only one with a PORTS clone.
;-)
Ever looked at Crux, Arch, or if you want "the original", BSD?
Gentoo isn't very unique in respect to portage.
Gentoo will not be able to exercise any full potential it may have. If the people at the OSL install Gentoo it would be different than if the Gentoo team installed it with fully customized stage1, etc. Just an interesting though.
Come on, if it's built by Dell in 3min the
PS/2 & USB controller will die, 3hrs the HDD controller will fail & wipe each HDD, but in 3 days they'll replace them with the equivelant Compaq or clone machine....
Flamebait I know... Am I Ashamed? No
: )
This is boring! It's all BSD and Linux! It would be really interesting to see how some of the new and completely from scratch open source stuff does too.
-Ted
-=-=- Quantum physics - the dreams stuff are made of.
They have failed to say which RAID controller is installed in the PowerEdge 2650, but I'm assuming it's the default Adaptec ROMB PERC 3/Di card. Following development of this driver on linux, there are issues with Linux and this driver. While I'm for a fair benchmark, this will most likely effect the Linux results.
A controller card agreeable to all OSs/Distros would be a good idea (if such a thing is even possible).
There are lies, damn lies, and benchmarks. I'm sure different configurations would produce similar complaints from other OSs/Distros.
I am, and always will be, an idiot. Karma: Coma (mostly effected by
What's with the x86- and Linux-centric approach? Do we really need to see how 6 different distributions can be tweaked to behave like one another on the same $4300 piece of hardware? I'd be extremely interested to see a G5 Xserve entered into that mix, although you'd clearly have to add some unnecessary doo-dads to the Mac to bring the price over $4000 (even with hardware RAID and the inability to drop below an 80GB HD to the 18GB like the Dell has, I could only bring a single processor Xserve up to $3500). Include a PPC Linux or two while you're at it. As it stands, the results will probably be at least a 6-way yawn-fest.
Well the differences between gentoo and other distros (speed wise) will mostly disappear when you custom tailor any distro (from source) to a given hardware setup, which is what they're going to be doing. But thats not what happens you download Fedora Core 1, Red Hat doesn't have the luxury of knowing what kind of system you have ahead of time.
The real factor in who wins here among linux distros will be the knowledge of the distro engineers doing the customizations on how best to configure their system to perform for the given benchmarks. Should be interesting though anyway.
We are USING THE INTERNET!!!!!
on our computer machines
"In this competition they will be allowing a community of experts in each OS to tweak their configurations to ensure maximum performance."
I can see it now, teams of KDE and GNOME developers going head to head to see who can come up with the best color scheme, antialiased fonts, and 'Are you sure you want to delete this?' dialog box. Followed by Round 2, where each group has to compile something built for the other camp's desktop, whoever can fight through the dependencies quicker wins!
Lord Linus, save us from OSNews.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
That's what I'm waiting for. I'm a champ!
Funny how its mentioned here less than a day after I last watched it. Best sketch from the movie:
Hedley Lamar: Qualifications?
Hired Thug: Rape, murder, arson, and rape.
Hedley Lamar: You said rape twice.
Hired Thug: I like rape!
(everyone laughs)
And to stay on topic:
Beavers?! We don't need no stinking beavers!
Define "friendly." FreeBSD has some of the best documentation I've seen anywhere, a more than supportive community and has the same GUIs that Linux does. Once you've set it up (the installer is curses based, but makes a LOT more sense than most point&click Linux installers), it's no more difficult to use than any Linux distribution. Come on, you've got more sense than to say this.
The World is Yours.
just imagine... well you know.
What?
Just imagine what?
A Beowulf cluster of Beavers?
Will they let you tweak Hyper Threading?
It'll be interesting to see how many people turn Hyper Threading OFF when doing some tests. I found that my database was 212% FASTER for read operations after I turned Hyper Threading off on the 2650.
I know benchmarks are cool and all, but I'd much rather see which distro performed well on older machines, like Pentiums and Pentium IIs. I have so many of these to deal with, and most everything sucks. Funny, cuz I remember running Solaris x86 and OS/2 and thinking they were excellent (sort of). Now, everything seems bloated. Of course, I'm expecting too much...
Even more so if the Gentoo people manage to compile their stuff with the Intel compiler. Everyone I've talked to says they see speedups of around 100% when apps are compiled with that thing.
I don't know, however, if it's possible to emerge Gentoo apps with icc instead of gcc. I'm using Gentoo on PPC, so it'd be hard for me to test
one hundred twenty
is just enough characters
to write a haiku
This contest is blatantly set up so that Gentoo, the obvious victor in a fair benchmarking contest, cannot win.
They are only allowing three days to set up the OS, everyone knows that you can't get gentoo installed, much less customized in that time.
And it was 523% cheaper, took 45 days less time, and tasted like chocolate.
Karma: Bad (mostly due to all those "In Soviet Russia" jokes)
I wonder when they will bentchmark the install times, like for gentoo it is extreemly slooooow.
[blue] - The Ministry of Information approved this message...
I guess your feeling kind of angry over gentoo's general acceptance among some geek crowds. I assume you have your reasons.
But I truelly believe that gentoo is what slackware once was, i.e. a distro that was forgiving of modifications, and it gives a pretty interface for doing so.
Its tedious to set up, but once initial install is done, its almost painless for the life of the machine. To me, the theoretical (or proven) performance advantages are almost secondary, in most applications, to portages forgiving nature.. Its just so easy to administer.
You would argue against the 'Gentoo-zealots' having no discernable advantage performance wise... And then suggest that portage is the only advantage Gentoo(zeolots) have (infered as I read it) over slackware.
A fact to consider: Optimized binaries generally run faster than unopimized ( an unqualified 3% - 15%, got the charts to prove it).
By the fact that portage is being ported to slackware, I assume your chosen distro, and by the fact that you mention it here, means that portage is important in your eyes. I have long held that the defining factor of any distro is its chosen package managment system (excusing directory layouts).
So in a way, isnt slackware becoming more like gentoo in effect? I mean after all, we are all dealing with the same fucking code with some minor tweaks and major package maintainance differences.
Oh, by the way. Gentoo is faster. Its going to kick Slackewares ass.
Noted Debian and 'apt-get' fan
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
I saw rpm packages for fedora of portage as well.
I agree, there are some really sick individuals out there.
I find a general lack of a definitive hardware list. I presume this can be had by subscribing the to forum or mailing list, but I really think this should be published up front in a no nonsense manner.
Or maybe I missed the page with the list... It happens.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
Not to nitpick or anything, but the phrase "very unique" is a pet-peeve of mine. It's a (futile, imho) attempt by the ineloquent to underscore the originality of something, resulting only in them looking stupid. Because this is Slashdot, and I'm such a nice guy, I'll let you in on this so that you don't look idiotic yourself in the future.
Unique by definition means that there is only one of whatever is being called unique; that's where the latin prefix uni- (meaning one) comes into play, semantically. Therefore, there cannot be degrees of uniqueness -- by definition it is a boolean state, being either unique, or, well, not.
So, in sum, nothing is very unique.
It's mindlessly redundant.
Thank you, drive through.
For me, apt-get really shines when ~removing~ packages, moreso than when installing them. That's still its prime advantage over up2date, last I used up2date.
I've been curious about Gentoo; does portage offer the removal advantages that apt-get does? I.e. when you remove a package, will portage remove all the packages that depend on that package, too, saving you the hassle of removal-dependency-hell?
Andrew Klaassen
Is there any benchmark comparison of these OSes on laptops? It would be really interesting to see how they manage APM/ACPI/... to balance performance and battery life.
"Open source" has taken on a whole new meaning since Hustler got involved...
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
2 Procs - comodity, lets see how the various distros do on 16-64 way servers
2 GB RAM ? why so limiting - lets get this up to 64 GB - or more
The disk system might not be too bad - but hardware Raid 5 would be more realistic
Of course what they are going to do is figure out which distro runs a FPS with the highest frame rate
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
If one of the reasons to run the benchmark is to show people how great F/OSS is, "round 2" seems like a natural. After all, don't we all know some people who have a couple of heavy paperweights sitting around? Wouldn't more people be willing to try something other than Windows if they saw that their old crappy box ran just as fast as their new shiny WinXP box?
Huh? Part of the reason I switched over to NetBSD from Linux years ago (for the most part, there are still times when a quick-and-dirty Slackware box does a special trick or two) was because NetBSD (and FreeBSD is very similar) was FAR easier. There's a learning curve involved, but there's 'one way' that things are done and it's the classic Unix way. You can pick up an O'Reilly book from 1993 and the info in it closely applies. Linux, on the other hand, is a big snarl of forks, each distro doing each task and configuration in it's own way, everybody contending that THEIR way is BEST, and as a consequence, no clear straight-forward anything, except gui buttons in places where GUI buttons aren't needed.
/etc/ files on a NetBSD box is a converging process. You learn more and more as you work with it, and it doesn't change when Johnny volunteer coder at Distro X learns Python and gets tricky with pretty buttons on a control panel.
Learn how to configure the
Anyway, harumph. BSD is NOT less user-friendly. Perhaps it has a smaller userbase, but if you're reading and commenting on this article, you're capable of working with it.
---
How is this a troll?
Its like being critical of my soccer team
because they didn't win against a team selected
from a dozen teams competing in the world cup?
Typical Slashdot Response #1 = Take bets on the winning score
Typical Slashdot Response #2 = "all of us
Typical Slashdot Response #3 = Being
(those few born with one are naturally excluded from the competition, as they've automatically scored 1 even before the competition starts, which by the letter of the rules means they cheated)
Typical Slashdot Response #4 - Anyhow, they prefer to be called Vagina Squirrels
I did a search on google, and found these rules for Beaver Challenge 2004 (PDF).
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Somethings wrong here.
Kind of like how Bill Clinton was Janet Reno's boss when Ken Starr had to ask Janet Reno for permission to investigate things?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I guess this would involve som serious tweaking...
A cheapo Dell blade is "wicked"? Dude, you have no clue whatsoever.
Hmm. she has a brother named Tit-o. a mere coincidence?
I have several BSD boxes (and solaris if you want to count that) laying around. And I see your point, but BSD is suffering (and has been) from the same problem Linux was suffering from back-n-the day. Lack of enterprise support, lack of a wide developer base, lack of company support (ie graphics drivers), and lack of a userbase. do I like BSD ? yes. Do i think it runs as nicely as Linux ? no. but perhaps thats a misconception on my part, I never dove head first into BSD like i did with linux. (I own and have read several books on/about linux, coding for linux etc... and I work with linux all day.)
"it doesn't change when Johnny volunteer coder at Distro X learns Python and gets tricky with pretty buttons on a control panel."
Truer words have not yet been spoken. Thats one of the major draw backs of the open source (linux in specific) community, moronic windows lackey's are migrating over and bringing their half assed backwards way of doing shit with them. (witness the fall of redhat and gentoo as an example)
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
...well, at least not if you ask a *BSD user.
Great! Where do i sign up!!!??!??! :P~~~~~~~
I am soooooo sick of people hyping this distro.
I spent weeks of my life getting it working on a P4 just to test out the claims.
Result?
No appreciable difference to any other distro with simillar configuration and a LOT more work.
Use what you want just please stop the teenage exageration.
Eugenia censors opinions to suit her amateurish pro monopoly$oft agenda.
I am soooooo sick of people hyping this distro.
I spent weeks of my life getting it working on a P4 just to test out the claims.
Result?
No appreciable difference to any other distro with simillar configuration and a LOT more work.
Use what you want - just please stop the teenage exageration.
This is because...
Which is mainly because of...
On the other hand...
mainly because it has a huge userbase and thus a lot of change is happening. Now this really comes down to what each individual wants and needs, but IMO, change is *not* a bad thing, which is why I prefer Linux over the others, simply because the level of development, and in the case of the kernel specifically, of hardware support, is higher. Frankly, I suspect that if BSD eventually succeeded as well as Linux has now, it would kill the very thing you admire it for. This is why I always get an odd feeling from people defending BSD, as if you admire it for *not* being popular, for its slow, top-down development, that you see its *lack* of change as a virtue. All of which makes me think the endless Linux-vs-BSD arguments are pointless, since it seems to me that both sides have fundamentally different goals in mind for their OS.
Bogomips
'nuff said.
BSD is friendly, its just picky about its friends ;)
The final list isn't complete, but why isn't QNX mentioned %)
No "Um's" please.
So?
Just cause you thought it was a hassle to setup (which it might be, I dont know since I havent tried it yet) why is it "teenage exageration" to suggest that it should be in the benchmarking too?
Seriously, all he said was "isnt there a free beos", not "OMFG DUDES! There's a free BeOS out now and it pwnz all j00r linux and BSD boxes with its almighty powers of doom! Go get it now! And the reason it isnt in the benchmark is that it would k1ck j00r azzez the instant it touched the computer." Now -that- would be teenage exageration.
And, seeing as I managed to not read the topic of your post before I went off and posted myself, I misinterpreted what you said.
First of all, Gentoo is good.
Second of all, Gentoo isn't the easiest thing to setup.
Third of all, it is a matter of taste. And just as we shouldnt judge the general users of GNU/Linux on the mad zealots that shouts the loudest, you shouldnt judge Gentoo on the Gentoo zealots.
I use gentoo and I love it. On the other hand, Ive also used pretty much any other distro out there. IMHO, the one that was most pain-like to set up was debian. Though it is, a matter of opinion.
Now, I will go hide under a rock for a month.
What seems to be lost on the /. crowd is the inherent human variable that will bias the results. Whose experts are "better"? That may be more pertinent on benchmarks than the OS tweaks. Some experts will pick the "best" combination of optimizations, others will pick "suboptimal" combos. Two OSes that are "theoretically" equivalent are not likely to perform as such, because of this human variable. There will likely be a false winner, too.
OSNews should build one very large team of experts, that plan and configure all the setups concurrently.
``Afterall, they're all going to use the latest 2.4 and 2.6 kernel and comparable glibc versions''
How about a 2.6 kernel with statically linked busybox/dietlibc userland? Could run pretty fast...
But, as somebody asked, what are they measuring?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
"just imagine... well you know."
A beowulf cluster of linux idiots. No, I can't. Oh, wait a minute ---- I've got it. Slashdot.
I've got one system that runs FreeBSD, so yes I'm familiar with the Ports tree. Ever try upgrading it? Pain in the ass compared to Gentoo. I finally installed 'portupgrade', and whenever I run it I get issues with 'stale dependencies' and the like. Emerge rarely complains about these things.
The USE flags are also incredibly helpful at times as well. They help with 'what can this application support' type stuff.
Portage = apt + ports
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
I wouldn't be all that sure about your predictions.
There are many things we don't know yet:
- What is going to be measured?
- How are measurements going to be weighted to compute the final score?
- What systems are participating?
The list of participating systems is not final yet. There are other systems out there besides *BSD and GNU/Linux. I could imagine an embedded Linux (without the weigt of a full GNU userland) beating the other Linuxen.
Certain things are pretty inefficient under UNIX and like systems (e.g. monitoring file descriptors for incoming data - although the *BSDs have kqueue and Linux 2.6 has epoll, see this benchmark). A non-UNIX contender might join and beat the others.
Hardware compatibility seems to vary among Linux distros. This could also affect scores (e.g. lost time getting things to work, that could have been spent on tweaking for performance).
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
So we now have two good reasons for doing without Hyper Threading: reduced cache size per virtual CPU, and increased complexity of the scheduler.
I have always wondered what the rationale for HT was. Clearly, it's increased performance for multithreading, but how?
The reasons I can come up with are reducing the number of context switches, and effectively increasing the number of registers. But then I look at a proper CPU (Alpha, MIPS, PPC, take your pick) and I see vastly more registers, and I hear that context switches are far less expesive there as well. All this wihout splitting cache and the extra complexity in the scheduler.
What am I missing?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I've been stuck on older systems more often than not and as a result I spend time tweeking the box to make it more effecent.
I memerise all my tweeks and improve on them as time progresses.
I know there are diffrences beween optomising on the low end and opomising on the high end.
But I think I know enough that I can do it.
I don't actually exist.
I'm seeing 279 days of uptime on both my 2650s running a very minimal install of RH7.2 with some (not all) errata packages applied, kernel is 2.4.18-24.8.0smp, a tad behind the bleeding edge, but serviceable nontheless.
They both have 100+ Gb RAID5 on Perc3/Di controllers, and are running a reasonably demanding application (Apache/Jakarta/Servlet, MySQL, Verity K2 with ~20Gb in collections so far..)
from the build documentation that I wrote 281 days ago:
*
* WARNING - RedHat 7.2 does not autodetect
* Perc3/Di RAID controllers correctly
*
- enter 'expert noprobe' at RedHatboot prompt
- say "No" when asked "Do you have a driver disk"
- choose a language, keyboard type, and installation method
- select "Add Device" when you get to "Devices" section
- select "SCSI" as "Device" type
- move down cursor to "Adaptec AACRAID (aacraid)", choose the "Specify module parameters" box
- enter aacraid_pciid=0x1028,0x0A,0x1028,0x011B in the dialog box
- select done
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
I haven't looked into performance tuning of machines, but off the top of my head I have installed ATLAS (Automatically Tuned Linear Algebra System) on a few things. Would the results of installing ATLAS on a computer be any help in setting general compile flags for all the other things which are installed? Are the processes used by ATLAS useful for tuning other things?
Gentoo is the coolest because it boots to a kick-ass purple framebuffer terminal.
Not to flame but gentoo is a long way from slackware, and unlikely to ever be that similar. It certainly won't be as fast unless the entire base system is re-written to be much less complicated. Sure the binaries might run a tiny amount faster but as you say this often isn't the driving factor, and if you install stuff on slack from source its irrelevant.
:-)
Slackware is so simple, clean, easy to understand the entire init/boot process within 5 minutes of cat'ing the scripts. It boots up in about 1/10th the time of gentoo (and most other OS's), and can easily be tweaked to do that faster (stopping ldconfig running at boot nearly halves slacks startup time).
I used slack for years, then went to freebsd because of the ports, then went to gentoo because of emerge. If its true that portage is going to appear on slackware, all i can say is woohoo!. I'll dump gentoo in a second if their packaging system ends up in slack. The main problem I had with slack was keeping software up to date, even compiling from source it was damn hard to not end up breaking things after a few glibc upgrades. Portage could cure that.
I'm all excited at the thought of getting slack back, damn I need to go outside more often
If they can't get the 2650 to work, I'll donate my toaster-oven.
I am the Lorvax, I speak for the machines.
Sorry to quibble, but "A musician needs the RIAA, is like a fish needs a bicycle" simply sounds better. I agree entirely with the sentiment, however!
~Morosoph
This!
Okay, there's no "beaverbeaverbeaver.com", but there should be!
~Morosoph
Exactly like that, but folks have short memories, and Democrats can do no evil in the eyes of fellow Democrats.
it was a joke -- laugh :)
The first version I recall is 5.1 was which indeed based on Red Hat. From the Mandrake 5.1 release notes.
"Linux-Mandrake is an updated Linux-RH 5.1 GPL, with KDE 1.0 fully integrated and preconfigured in it. Those two parts have been (not so much) modified and improved to work properly together."
Red Hat didn't use to include KDE so we had to download it and configure it ourselves. Actually it was pretty easy. But for those who had heard of Linux and wanted the easiest to use DE (because of KDE) many tried Mandrake. I actually was a Huge Fan of Mandrake till about 7.2 IIRC. Man was that a good release. But since then I've simply not had anything good to say about their QA. Not to flame but IMHO since they simply stopped "building on" RH releases their quality has gone way downhill.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
export CFLAGS="-Wall -pipe -O2 -fomit-frame-pointer -fno-strict-aliasing \
-mpreferred-stack-boundary=4 -malign-double -march=athlon-xp -frename-registers \
-fprefetch-loop-arrays -falign-functions=64 -ffast-math -mno-align-stringops \
-mfpmath=387 -fnew-ra"
export LDFLAGS="-Xlinker -s"
Today, don't use the options -fssa and -fschedule-insns (and related of the same name) because it crashes.
I don't use -maccumulate-outgoing-args -finline-functions -funroll-loops because it generates FAT CODE !!!.
open4free
For kernels, i should use the option -mpreferred-stack-boundary=2 [2^2 = 4 bytes] (instead of -mpreferred-stack-boundary=4 [2^4 = 16 bytes]).
open4free
At the very least its open tools on an NT kernel (assuming cygwin on 2k or xp or other stable windows platform)
Just a me-too, so I'm doing at as an AC.
I'm amazed that any of the linux distros are hiring people who think typing root passwords to python-gui-wizards is a good way to administer systems. But that's what it seems they're all turning into.
try it and see what it's like to use a modern software management system.
Nice, try again without the attitude though. I've got a FreeBSD box, and the ports stuff is really nice for installing. But for upgrading and keeping up to date it's much more of a pain than portage. And the 'make world' stuff is a bloody nightmare compared to anything I've seen. Debian's "apt-get dist-upgrade" is very nice by comparison. Gentoo just happens to always be up to date.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
OpenBSD being in this competition is silly. I say this as a user and lover of OpenBSD since 2.5.
OpenBSD focuses on extreme security, which goes beyond just auditing code. It has mechanisms in place, which are specifically there to heighten security first and foremost. Quite happily foregoing speed and scalability (in places where it is unavoidable).
Examples are, consistency checking all over the place and randomisations, which provide greater security but inevitably, hurt performance.
This would be like comparing high performance cars and throwing in an M1 Abrams main battle tank to also be tested as a high performance car. In the end, the tank will obviously have terrible top speed, acceleration and cornering ability and everyone will pronounce it crap. But try defending a nation with Ferrari 360 Modena's.
This course is not for this horse. What's more, OpenBSD has been very tentative about moving forward on SMP for very good reasons. It opens up a huge can of worms (bugs), which makes understanding code and thus auditing extremely difficult. The machine being used for the test is SMP!
FreeBSD SMP is supposed to be fantastic in the new technology releases and so-so in the stable releases.
This test would be better conducted in about a year and without OpenBSD (even if it did have SMP by then). OpenBSD is never going to be the highest performance server because that is not what the OpenBSD project strives for and they are willing to hurt that area in the name of security.
If this machine were not SMP, my money would be on NetBSD with FreeBSD coming a close second.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
Any changes that matter can be easily rolled into a BSD Unix. Even if it's GPL'd code, it can be studied and re-implemented.
Lack of change IS a virtue. Read again what I said: A solid, reliable OS converges, instead of just forking all over the place. It slowly continues to get better. The hardware ports of NetBSD are getting to be amazing. I *like* being able to roll out and run the same exact source tarballs (kernel AND userland) on all the weird hardware I collect.
---
Exactly like that, but folks have short memories, and Democrats can do no evil in the eyes of fellow Democrats.
Like the old saying goes, power corrupts.
For all of 11 months of 1993 and all of 1994, Clinton had a democrat controlled House and Senate. They got to push through anything they wanted.
Now that the shoe is on the other foot, Bush has a Republican controlled House and Senate all the democrats can do is complain about it.
I'm a Republican. I will be voting for Bush in November, not because I think he's perfect. In fact he is flawed in many ways, but I'd prefer him over any of the Democrats who have a chance to win.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Within reason, but sometimes being excessively virtuous can get you into trouble too.
What you call "forks", I just call "distributions". The Linux *kernel* isn't forking, it is in fact solid, reliable, *and* converging, as virtually every separate kernel development eventually makes it into Linus's tree, like SE Linux or the preemptible kernel patch or the patch for embedded systems to allow them to remove unessential features from the kernel. All these things and most others may start separately but eventually make their way into the mainstream kernel, as all of the above made it into 2.6.
The *core* of any GNU/Linux system is usually the same on all distributions (kernel+GNU+misc), but all those different approaches to how to put a GNU/Linux system together is a good thing in the long run, because since we're dealing with open-source software (for the most part) in all these distributions, good ideas that show up in one are very likely to show up in others (just as you pointed out BSD borrowing from Linux and vice versa).
Think genetics and evolution: a large, dynamic population with a lot of mutation and interaction going on within. The bad "traits" that are created tend to die off, while the good "traits" get spread around. All those different distributions are *competing* with each other, and I happen to believe that wherever there is real competition, the consumer usually wins.
Since GNU/Linux is a combination of separate parts that becomes a melange, the need to *really* fork GNU/Linux is virtually unnecessary (Linux distros to me are essentially the same parts but organized and pieced together differently), as the system is already relatively "fine-grained" and decentralized. This is unlike BSD where the whole system (kernel + base + important utils) is treated as one entity, resulting in *real* forks (Free,Net,Open,etc) that *don't* converge, and eventually diverge even in the kernels.
Chaos is not just a destroyer, its also a *creator*. Long live the bazaar!
Lighten up and learn to laugh at yourselves, geeks; that was _funny_
that's not a troll, a troll is +4 mod on a content-free post...