*BSD News Article 31810


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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
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From: pk@cs.few.eur.nl (Paul Kranenburg)
Subject: Re: NetBSD--which Suns can use it??
Message-ID: <1994Jun19.132149.24937@cs.few.eur.nl>
Sender: news@cs.few.eur.nl
Reply-To: pk@cs.few.eur.nl
Organization: Erasmus University Rotterdam
References: <2tbhn3$dgm@Venus.mcs.com> <DERAADT.94Jun12234937@newt.fsa.ca> <CrCD2F.9v2@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
Date: Sun, 19 Jun 1994 13:21:49 GMT
Lines: 25

In <CrCD2F.9v2@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> richard@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Richard Tobin) writes:

>In article <DERAADT.94Jun12234937@newt.fsa.ca> deraadt@fsa.ca (Theo de Raadt) writes:
>>Sun4c line:
>>	sparcstation 1, 1+, 2, IPC, IPX.
>>	It's very stable and reliable. It feels slower than SunOS.

>Do you know why it feels slower?  Is it the shared library
>implementation?

I don't think so (disclaimer: since I wrote the implementation, you may want
to seek a second opinion), as the amount of overhead associated with loading
shared libraries is essentially the same as in SunOS.

Over the last few weeks I have done some work to reduce the overhead that
comes with "context stealing" in the sun4c's MMU, but the effect of this
was rather less than I had hoped for on my IPC (8 hardware contextses; not
exactly too many when running X Windows).

Also, the kernels I have built so far had -DDEBUG on, which carries extra
overhead in locore.s when entering eg. trap handlers, but I cannot quantify
its effects at the moment.

-pk