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FreeBSD SMPng Interview with Scott Long
animus9 writes "There's an interesting interview with Scott Long over at the ONLamp.com. Scott explains the difference between the various locking methods, and the current status of SMP in FreeBSD 5. He also compares the new SMP implementation with that of FreeBSD 4.x, NetBSD, DragonFly, and Linux. Other items touched upon include scalability, the status of KSE & ULE, and much more."
This article discusses FreeBSD's preference for sleep locks as versus the spin locks in Linux.
Anybody know why Linux went for the spin lock approach? What are the relative merits?
OpenBSD basically needs a bigger contributing (at least PRing) user base. So does NetBSD of course. The number of developers is fine in both because they are talented and can work together (oppose thousands of Linux devs who still can't engineer for stability), but the user bases are too small to really test everything at once.
Shame isn't it? With Linux stealing the spotlight all the other more deserving projects are left lacking users.
Sam ty sig.
The first time I booted 2.6.3 (mainline, under Slackware, previously 2.6.2 with less problems) every file opened for writing would be truncated and never written to. My entire home dir was mangled and it took a very long painful sitting of deleting and re-configuring before things worked again, and even then there were flake outs. I never booted 2.6.3 again.
2.6 then had some large changes (nptl, new SCSI subsystem without warning, etc.) and now at 2.6.10 seems to be at least sort-of stable, but there are compile warnings in wireless drivers I think are actual mistakes and am glad I don't have that hardware. On the other hand, and this is a big thing in favor of the BSD style kernel configuration, with 2.6.10 a certain magical combination of kernel options left me without a console outside of X (and no, I did not ask it to use serial console), and reconfiguring from scratch was the only thing that fixed it. I still have not been able to reproduce this (but remember it happening with an earlier kernel, might have been a 2.4) or even figure out what option/combination caused it. I mean, that's pretty f#ed up.
Sam ty sig.
Bzzzt try again, troll. NPTL has been in Linux since the middle of the 2.5 development cycle.
/usr/portage/dev-libs/glibc/glibc-2.3.4.20040619-r 2.ebuild
# Minimum kernel version we support
# (Recent snapshots fails with 2.6.5 and earlier)
MIN_KERNEL_VERSION="2.6.5"
Headshot. If it hadn't changed, there'd be no reason that newer user-land nptl libraries wouldn't work with older kernels. Read up before you think you're fighting 'trolls'.
And there was no "new SCSI subsystem" in 2.5 or 2.6 period.
http://www.webservertalk.com/message841936.html
Sorry, really bad wording on my part, based on some confusing Slash comments I read before. Hardly trolling, you'll notice.
Linux does not cater for incompetant people
No, I actually did check everything, and have been configuring and compiling Linux kernels with mostly success (except weird shit like this) for years. There's no magic to it, don't pretend to be a technical expect because you've never found a bug. Same goes for that "absolutely no idea when it comes to kernel coding" assumption: I am a coder and I do know when a warning is an error in disguise. By the looks of it the calling parameters of something internal changed (since this did not happen in 2.6.9) but not all drivers were updated, and nobody cared. If this is not the case, they should fix compile warnings: the BSDs do, because warnings left over in 'stable' branches signify lazy/careless developers (i.e. Linux contributors).
Nice AC posting by the way, if you're going to make insulting claims against someone, do it with your own name or risk not being taken seriously. If I wanted to troll, which I don't, I wouldn't do it under my own name. From this perspective we gather that you're the troll and I'm making honest observations. Have a really bad day, you deserve it.
Sam ty sig.