Slashdot Mirror
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."
I must say that reading this interview only reinforced my gut feeling that FreeBSD and other BSD variants start to look as a viable alternative to Solaris and Linux. This is consistent with the attitude in my company. To make a long story short, I received the email first thing in the morning from the IT department. Our network would be undergoing a major overhaul to correct the ad hoc growth it had experienced in the last year, and starting next week Internet access would be sporadic. There would also be a new firewall and security measures, replacing the old OpenBSD system I'd managed to get installed last Spring. Happy for the heads-up, I went to work right away to make sure Linux had no place on our network. This was not the first time that I had faced this threat.
One day about a year ago our network guy gets asked to draw up firewall plans for this subnet of servers we have. Our network guy was your typical GNU-slinger save that he had a cascade of flowing hair down the back of his head and not a beard hanging from his face. And yeah, you can guess what he thought those firewalls were gonna run. Fast forward two days. I'd caught wind of the plans and had charts, graphs, and comparisons written up detailing OpenBSD and Linux security. Since this GNU guy had a mullet and dressed like a slob, I got taken seriously. Not to mention my data, impenetrable by any hippy "logic." OpenBSD was the more secure, even to the beancounters and idtiot management. So thanks to me, our firewalls happily run OpenBSD and not Linux, which would have buffer-overflowed into no-man's land every other hour. The Open Source Mullet gives me a lot of dirty looks lately.
Since the Open Source Mullet had been canned, a new threat had arisen at my workplace: the Fat Perl Hacker had assumed most of the Open Source Mullet's system and network administration duties, and it was no mystery to anyone at my workplace that he had a hard-on for Linux tucked away under his enormous, cascading gut. Since he was a major suck-up and workaholic, he had a lot more credibility than the Open Source Mullet this would be a real challenge for once. Dealing with the Open Source Mullet had been cake.
That night, I went to work on my strategy. First, I would document the changes in Linux and OpenBSD since a year ago when we last went with a security plan. Linux was still at version 2.4, while OpenBSD had raced from version 2.8 to 3.1 a major revision! This was good so far, and I included the relevant diffs for each. I wondered what the Fat Perl Hacker was up to and pushed ahead with my preparations.
Tuesday morning, I went to talk with the VP of Operations, who had final say on the network project. I wouldn't leave anything to chance. But after chatting with him for a few minutes, I learned of a major monkey-wrench I hadn't expected: instead of a Unix firewall system, he was planning on installing a dedicated firewall box running Windows XP. Thankful for my fortuitous social engineering, I went back to my desk and began making over my strategy to deal with this new threat. Not only would I have to deal with Linux, I'd have to eschew the Windows option now.
Sitting in front of my iBook after work, I realized that taking on Windows XP in the same manner I was going to deal with Linux would be foolish if not wasteful. Obviously the Windows option was not about numbers, anecdotes, or experience. It was a bean-counting decision and all of the security statistics in the world wouldn't matter. Since I hadn't the foggiest about how our accountants viewed the whole operation and didn't have time to learn, I'd have implement a rapid-fire real-life assault on the Windows box, which was sitting on the VP's desk awaiting its place on the network. It was time to put on my Black Hat, and that night I stayed up until 02:00 researching Windows XP vulnerabilities. Linux would have to wait.
With just two days before the network changeover was to take place, I marched into work Wednesday morning knowing
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?
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.