FreeBSDCon 99

xlogan writes "I received my FreeBSD 99 catalog in the mail today from Walnut Creek and The FreeBSD Mall and it included a little brochure about FreeBSDCon '99. Hope I can get work to pay for the trip ;-) "

Comments

Re:BSD SMP support

[Eivind Eklund]

I've been trying to decide whether to load FreeBSD onto a dual 266 but a lot of what I've read says that the 2.2.x kernel is better for SMP.

It all depends on your workload. The FreeBSD VM system is probably still superior to the Linux one (though Linux has seen a lot of improvements), which in many cases will make FreeBSD run faster than Linux, with or without SMP. For compilation benchmarks on an SMP system (and those may or may not be relevant for your workload), FreeBSD beat Linux easily in the last benchmark I saw.

For a threaded CPU-bound program, I would expect Linux to beat FreeBSD (though I've not tested the case). There are some scheduler changes that have just gone into FreeBSD-current (if I read my commit logs right) that should avoid cache trashing; this should give a clear speedup. We've also recently been looking at other SMP-related improvements (but none have entered the tree for a long time).

Eivind.