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

Re:Singularity is truly an intriguing system.

[CyricZ]

Now that you're done being sarcastic, go look into some of the research that is being done at Microsoft Research. Like it or not, it is top of the line work. They're at the cutting edge, and they're well financed.

Re:Singularity is truly an intriguing system.

[geomon]

Like it or not, it is top of the line work. They're at the cutting edge, and they're well financed.

Okay, but how many of their innovations (Christ Microsoft loves that word!) actually make it to the outside world?

I think your comparison to Bell Labs is good, however, in that much of what Bell Labs created required others to make into real products. AT&T/Ma Bell sat on every innovation until it nearly suffocated due to lack of capital investment.

Typical

[Bogtha]

This is pretty typical. Microsoft's biggest competitor is their old software, so their new offerings have to look good against it.

Remember Windows 95's marketing? "32-bit memory protection makes it uncrashable!" Remember Windows 98's marketing? "Even more stable than 95!" Remember Windows 2000's marketing? "Based on an NT core, it's more stable than the crash-prone Windows 9x!"

Its revisionist history. The only way to get a somewhat accurate picture is if you compare their current claims with what they've said about new technology in the past.

Re:Too Telling

[websaber]

This is the real big threat to the open source community. Once Microsoft becomes honest whith themselves they might start making real progress on the engineering side of their product. Marketing will get you so far when you have no more competition but good engineering can make it stick.

This isn't Microsoft

[The Pim]

This is Microsoft Research. They have the same independence as university researchers--that is how Microsoft lures them away from academia. These guys are making honest comparisons to Linux and FreeBSD, because that is what they do as good researchers. Microsoft is enlightened enough not to interfere.

Re:44 pages and the main question is still unanswe

[trondd]

You clearly don't know much about what makes an operating system stable... Stability depends partly on how much error checking the compiler is capable of doing, partly on how people write software (design) and partly on how well the operating system is designed to separate processes and different parts from each other. Singulary addresses all of these issues: Its mainly writen in a "safe" language which is strongly typed and does lots of compiletime check and it is a microkernel operating system which (at least in theory) prevents your cheezy usb webcam driver from crashing the kernel. Most other unix wannabe systems are writen in the ancient language C :), and run monolithic kernels.

But singularity isn't all new, it just implements old ideas: Occam and QNX!

But in my opinion, Singularity just might be the most interessting os to emerge in the last years. It will be interesting to see how long it will take the free software world to come up with something similar :) (btw, I am a long term happy gnu/linux user, and have no plan of switching...)

Re:Too Telling

[Deviate_X]

I don't know what those 5m vs 1m cycles are doing. But what I do know that fundamentally Windows was designed with high-performance threading/wait operations and high-performance asynchronous operations, whereas Unix and its derivates rely on high performance process-creation, blocking I/O for sever applications.

I.e. Apache 1.3x series performs poorly on windows because it was a straight copy of the Unix edition - using processes rather than threads.

Re:dependance or dependability?

[cloudmaster]

It's a Microsoft OS, and you're saying that they made a mistake when mentioning that one of their goals is increased dependence? Hell yes that's their goal. Vendor lock-in, forced upgrade cycles, dependence - all the same thing, and all the goal of any winning software company. :)

supporting quote

[The Pim]

Quote from a Microsoft researcher:

It's very nice working for an outfit that lets you do full-time research, doing pretty much what you want to do. Microsoft generally has fairly bad press, but I think that this is something that Microsoft should really brag about, because they pay lots of people to do essentially very freely directed research. They don't correct our papers, they let us go to whatever conferences we want to. I'm publishing at a higher rate than I did at the university.

(Simon Peyton Jones, 2001)

Windows is faster in Ubuntu

[Ticklemonster]

I am a recent convert to Ubuntu, but I do Unreal Tournament mapping which can't be done in Ubuntu, so I had a dilemma. I was about to learn how to dual boot when I found out about VMware player, and setting up a virtual machine to run XP. I set it up, and honestly, XP runs faster this way than it ever did on a regular install. No, I can't install stuff like video drivers I need, but the drivers that install with XP work well enough to run the unreal editor. I wonder if someone could test XP in VMware in Ubuntu against XP on a hard drive and see what kind of difference there is. I sure seems like XP is way faster than it ever was.

Shame to have to set up like this just to run unreal editor, though. Oh, for you gamers out there, UT runs so much smoother and faster in Ubuntu, it's not funny. UT2k4 (has linux installer on the 1st cd) runs way better in Ubuntu also. You might want to check it out if you have a spare hard drive you can play around with.