Microsoft Reports OSS Unix Beats Windows XP

Mortimer.CA writes "In a weblog entry, Paul Murphy mentions a Microsoft report (40 page PDF) that in many instances FreeBSD 5.3 and Linux perform better than Windows XP SP2. The report is about MS' Singularity kernel (which does perform better than the OSS kernels by many of the metrics they use), and some future directions in OS design (as well as examination of the way things have been done in the past)." From the post: "What's noteworthy about it is that Microsoft compared Singularity to FreeBSD and Linux as well as Windows/XP - and almost every result shows Windows losing to the two Unix variants. For example, they show the number of CPU cycles needed to "create and start a process" as 1,032,000 for FreeBSD, 719,000 for Linux, and 5,376,000 for Windows/XP."

Comments

Singularity is truly an intriguing system.

[CyricZ]

Singularity is a very interesting system. But that's not surprising, when you consider some of the brains behind it: Galen Hunt, Wolfram Schulte, Ulfar Erlingsson, Rebecca Isaacs, and many others who are well-known for their research.

In twenty or so years we may look back at Microsoft Research with the same admiration we have for Bell Labs.

Re:Singularity is truly an intriguing system.

[yurnotsoeviltwin]

You definitely have a good point there. Everyone around here bashes Microsoft obviously, and for good reason. Their business practices can get a bit on the shady side sometimes, though they problably aren't deserving of quite the amount of hate they get around these parts. But their programming and research, particularly research, isn't that shabby, and certainly isn't "evil." Remember, M$ doesn't just sell operating systems, it makes them too, and to do that you have to have brains. I think some people around here need to give at least the engineers and researchers in Microsoft a little more respect.

Give me a fucking break

[Wonko42]

I've been seeing this damn report hailed all over the Internet for the last few days as Microsoft saying Unix is better than Windows, but apparently nobody has actually read the report.

For one thing, Windows is not slower than Unix in most of the tests. It's slower than Unix in some of the tests and faster in others. For another, these benchmark results are for low-level things like spawning processes and threads. Any programmer who knows anything about Unix and Windows will tell you that threads are cheaper in Windows and processes are cheaper in Unix, because that's how they were designed. So of course Windows is going to be slower than Unix at creating processes, and of course Unix is going to be slower than Windows at creating threads.

The only thing worth reporting about this thing is the performance of Singularity, which looks like it's shaping up to be an excellent modern kernel.

Did you actually read it?

[cyclopropene]

Interesting...Singularity is ostensibly supposed to be about stability, but the 44-page paper has no data on this. Kinda like saying, "Our new bulletproof vest is 40% lighter than our leading competitors, and twice as flexible. How well does it stop bullets, you ask? Sorry...we do not yet have results for that benchmark.".

You didn't really read it, did you? From TFA(bstract).

...Singularity demonstrates the practicality of new technologies and architectural decisions, which should lead to the construction of more robust and dependable systems.

The point of the paper is NOT to demonstrate a fully working uber-dependable system, but to validate the practicality of the architecture that is under development, and the new technologies being included. That's why they have the section on performance, with the preface (right above your quote, btw):

If Singularity's goal is more dependable systems, why does this report include performance measurements? The answer is simple: these numbers demonstrate that [the] architecture that we proposed not only does not incur a performance penalty, but is often as fast as or faster than more conventional architecture[s]. In other words, it is a practical basis on which to build a system.

That's the point of the paper. I understand, however, that you might have been in too much of a rush to get first post that you didn't understand the point of the paper...