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

Late /. - Really Late...

[Master of Transhuman]

I read this a couple days ago from one of the sidebar articles.

Slow news day?

Linux is NOT a Unix Variant

[davidwr]

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.

Linux is NOT a Unix Variant. It's a near-work-alike of Unix and has a high level of source-level compatibility for user-space applications. Most distributions have the same or compatible scripting tools like Perl, bash, etc.

However, under the hood there are significant differences. It's like saying a gasoline-powered car is a variant of an diesel-powered car, because the driver's experience is almost the same.

To trump it all, from what I hear Linus himself said that Linux is not Unix. Or did he say Linux is not Minix. Either way, Linux is not Unix.