*BSD News Article 34253


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From: John Dyson <dysonj@delphi.com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc
Subject: Re: Whats wrong with Linux networking ???
Date: Sat, 13 Aug 94 12:11:22 -0500
Organization: Delphi (info@delphi.com email, 800-695-4005 voice)
Lines: 29
Message-ID: <RM8QcVi.dysonj@delphi.com>
References: <RSANDERS.94Aug9003813@hrothgar.mindspring.com> <CuA6w1.5tF@calcite.rhyolite.com> <32cs6g$l9t@klaava.Helsinki.FI> <CuDvpC.Irz@calcite.rhyolite.com> <1994Aug13.012953.5809@cs.brown.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: bos1b.delphi.com
X-To: Mark Weaver <mhw@cs.brown.edu>

Mark Weaver <mhw@cs.brown.edu> writes:
 
>However, regardless of the filesystem, I have found that when I
>have run Linux, it hardly ever thrashes with my 16mb, whereas NetBSD
>thrashes very easily.  They must be doing something right.
 
THIS IS NOT MEANT TO BE FLAME-BAIT, but this is the reason why we worked
on the VM system in FreeBSD.  Whether or not it gets the approval of
all on how we made the changes, we did and it works better than the
original FreeBSD/386BSD VM.  ANYONE developing a *BSD can look at what
we did and do it better if they want.  There is NOTHING at all intrinsically
bad about how the (386,Free,Net)BSD VM works -- it just needed a little
work.
 
DG and I on the FreeBSD team noticed that the VM performance was sub-par,
and started working on it right-after FreeBSD V1.0 (actually I started on
it almost 1yr before that.)  There are some problems with Linux VM too, and
we could learn for those mistakes.
 
Also, there is a significant and subtile bug in the scheduling algorithm
in the scheduler on *BSD...  It is a simple fix, and makes X appear to be
much more snappy when other processes are running on the system.  Again, there
isn't alot that is totally broken in *BSD, but it just needs a few fixes.
 
I think that it is time for a truce on these flame-wars, and attempt to learn
from each of the BSD/(Free-U**X) variants.
 
John
dyson@implode.root.com