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Linux May Need a Rewrite Beyond 48 Cores
An anonymous reader writes "There is interesting new research coming out of MIT which suggests current operating systems are struggling with the addition of more cores to the CPU. It appears that the problem, which affects the available memory in a chip when multiple cores are working on the same chunks of data, is getting worse and may be hitting a peak somewhere in the neighborhood of 48 cores, when entirely new operating systems will be needed, the report says. Luckily, we aren't anywhere near 48 cores and there is some time left to come up with a new Linux (Windows?)."
Can somebody please explain what the fuck they are actually talking about? They've dumbed down the terminology to the point I have no idea what they are saying. Is this some kind of cache-related issue? Inefficient bouncing of processes between cores? What?
Core !=CPU
Hahaha. Oh arrogances from ignorance, how I loath you.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Which is why he's treated like shit: Can't have any kind of excellence here, Taco wants to keep that old-school newsgroup feel. That's the only explanation that still fits.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
The very act of summarization constitutes an act of commentary. You're saying "I think the pertinent parts of this story are these, and the most important questions raised are those."
A good summary invites commentary and frames the questions in a way which makes for better discussion, but don't for a second imagine the OP ought to be value-neutral (if such a thing could even exist.)
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
I was kind of wondering about the "modern operating systems" comment... I think he meant "desktop operating systems".
What's a "desktop operating system" these days ? The only mainstream OS that hasn't seen extensive use and development in SMP server environments for a decade plus is OS X. For all the others, "desktop" vs "server" is just a matter of the bundled software and kernel tuning.
Even OS/2 could scale to 1024 processors if I recall correctly.
Yeah. Just like those old PPC Macs were "up to twice as fast" as a PC.
Trolling, I'm sure, but to people who take "GNU/Linux" seriously: how much of any given distro is really GNU code anymore? While GNOME may still be preferred by Ubuntu, there are also a lot of Kbuntu users, and many other distros seem to prefer KDE. Neither XFree86 nor X.Org were ever GNU. Smaller installations, like smartphones and home gateways (which often do run Linux, even if you can't install a custom version like DD-WRT), use busybox for their basic command line tools, and almost certainly do not use glibc. Debian even went for the eglibc fork, partially because Ulrich Drepper makes Theo DeRaadt look like a nice guy. HURD has gone nowhere for 20 years now, even if it does have some neat ideas.
Non-GNU GUI applications and libraries now make up a huge percentage of a desktop distro, Apache and custom web apps make up a big chunk of server code, and smartphones may or may not have any GNU code at all.
So what's left of GNU code now? Well, gcc is likely to keep being the world's de facto C compiler (though even this was mainly because of the egcs fork way back when). I'm sure there will be legions of emacs users for years to come, and I guess a lot of people still prefer GNOME. GNU's basic command line tools and bash will no doubt still be used on servers and desktops. But is this really sufficient to warrant a "GNU/Linux" nomenclature, not to mention all the pedantry that surrounds it?
To the AnonCow troll above: GNU code has nothing to do with how the kernel handles multicore processors, so your whole point is moot within this context.
Not a typewriter