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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."
Isn't it telling that the idea of Microsoft telling the truth is considered front page news on /.?
The Russian Mafia will mod you down just to see if the Moderate button works.
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.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I just have to bow before the guy who can read a 44 page pdf and post an intelligible, coherent comment on it in less than two minutes. I just have to ask - where do you get that kind of caffeine?
Amazing.
The Russian Mafia will mod you down just to see if the Moderate button works.
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.
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.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
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.
:) (btw, I am a long term happy gnu/linux user, and have no plan of switching...)
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
he gets it right here
You didn't really read it, did you? From TFA(bstract).
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):
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...
Shouldn't you be doing something useful?
For example, apache and sshd, and various FTPds, can be restarted without anyone possibly noticing, because they simply leave any running children open. You connected before a certain time, you got the old copy, you connected after it, you got the new one.
And, of course, many protocols work fine if you go away for five seconds, like SMB. The client program will just say 'oops, connection hiccup' and reconnect silently, and the end user never notices. Same with IMAP clients. They go 'Hey, the server closed my connection, I better open it again'.
Restarting services on a Linux box is 99% transparent to end users, even ones that are currently directly doing something with the server.
Rebooting is not transparent, even if all the connections are reaqquired automatically, simply because work stopped for the two minute reboot.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?