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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!uunet!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!bloom-picayune.mit.edu!athena.mit.edu!tytso From: tytso@athena.mit.edu (Theodore Y. Ts'o) Subject: Re: Catch What They're Saying About Us... In-Reply-To: wjolitz@soda.berkeley.edu's message of 23 Sep 92 00:34:11 GMT Message-ID: <TYTSO.92Sep23235422@SOS.mit.edu> Sender: news@athena.mit.edu (News system) Nntp-Posting-Host: sos.mit.edu Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology References: <19oe23INNqh0@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: Thu, 24 Sep 1992 03:54:29 GMT Lines: 43 In article <19oe23INNqh0@agate.berkeley.edu> wjolitz@soda.berkeley.edu (William F. Jolitz) writes: >Check out the "Re: Linux or 386BSD: neither or both ??" thread in >comp.os.linux. It's pretty amazing what's being said about 386BSD and >the people who've worked so hard on it. >Since I'm not one who likes to let disinformation be the order of the >day, I've challanged the Linux people to put their money where their A couple of points. First of all, note that the few people that have engaged in that thread do not represent the views of the majority of Linux users/developers out here. Most of us have just ignored most of the thread as a waste of time. Secondly, I don't think "disinformation" is a fair way to characterize those postings. They were merely observations by a number of people that subjectively, on their machines, Linux felt faster than 386BSD. Bill then fired off a completely unprofessional "You must not know what you are doing", which kicked off personal attacks on both sides, and the thread denegerated from there. However, all this brouhaha doesn't change the fact that a number of people have reported that when they tried the two operating systems, they felt that 386 BSD was slower than Linux. Unless you have reason to believe that these observers were out-and-out telling lies, calling their observations "disinformation" is just not fair. I will note that most of those people had relatively small amounts of memory, and so perhaps Linux's use shared libraries were decisive. Linux also supports copy-on-write when forking, which I understand 386 BSD does not do (my information on this may be dated; please correct me *gently* if I am wrong), and that may have helped as well. Linux also has fewer abstraction layers than BSD does at this point, so that may have helped a tiny bit as well. It would be nice to get some hard performance data on the two operating systems. Unfortunately, I don't have room on my hard disk for 386 BSD, so it would be hard for me to do the testing myself. (Due to all of the different variances of hard disk speed, amount of memory, speed of processor, etc., you can probably only do fair tests by running the two operating systems side by side.) =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Theodore Ts'o bloom-beacon!mit-athena!tytso 308 High St., Medford, MA 02155 tytso@athena.mit.edu Everybody's playing the game, but nobody's rules are the same!