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From: dejan@cdfsga.fnal.gov (Dejan Vucinic)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.os.386bsd.misc
Subject: Re: Why would I want LINUX?
Date: 20 Aug 1993 14:30:57 GMT
Organization: Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia IL
Lines: 32
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <252n71$2d4@fnnews.fnal.gov>
References: <MIKE.93Aug19115915@pdx800.jf.intel.com> <250m5t$dmk@europa.eng.gtefsd.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: cdfsga.fnal.gov
In article <250m5t$dmk@europa.eng.gtefsd.com>, niemidc@oasis.gtefsd.com (David C. Niemi) writes:
|> Linux is still a very lean, fast OS compared to ANY of its competition
|> (even some versions of DOS!)
Ooops!
Watch out! This implies that DOS, being a single-user-all-the-CPU-you-can-get
OS, is at least as fast as 386 Unices. BUT:
Some time ago, I was talking with a friend of mine, trying to convince
her to switch from DOS to *BSD/Linux. She used her 386 box for (heavy? :)
number crunching with Fortran, she was writing a Ph.D. thesis and was spending
most of her time calculating some fractal motion. So, I needed a little demo
to show her that she could indeed do all that she usually did under messdos
and pay 0.0 for it. I picked 386bsd, version 0.1 it was, when the first bunch
of patches was released, and compiled a tiny fortran->C source compiler I
found on ref.tfs.com. It compiled her programs without a cough, and gcc did
the rest.
Now, the copmarison. Those were EXACTLY THE SAME MACHINES. Bought from
a same vendor, exactly the same equipment inside, 387 FPU in both of them.
Fortran on DOS was an expensive commercial product, it was dos 5.0 if I
remember well, and under DOS the program ran about a minute and five seconds
on both of them. We ran the program on BSD, fifteen seconds. Well, I know
that in real mode 386 emulates 32bit integer operations, but FOUR TIMES
FASTER!? Get real!
All this probably holds for Linux as well. It seems that DOS engineers
used some other mathematics in their time calculations. ;>
Don't trust figures too much. Try and measure. You'll be surprized.
Regards, Dejan