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From: lm@neteng.engr.sgi.com (Larry McVoy)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.sys.sgi.misc
Subject: Re: no such thing as a "general user community"
Followup-To: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.sys.sgi.misc
Date: 27 Mar 1997 05:58:20 GMT
Organization: Silicon Graphics Inc., Mountain View, CA
Lines: 56
Message-ID: <5hd29s$e7t@fido.asd.sgi.com>
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Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:37800 comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:6470 comp.sys.sgi.misc:29425
Mika Ruohotie (mickey@cantina.clinet.fi) wrote:
: what is the major difference between xfs and ufs? i am still under impression
: that on a news server environment xfs would perform more efficienty. yet i
: admit that the latest development on filesystems on freebsd have made some
: serious leaps. and the gap is probably narrow as it's been pointed out.
XFS is a journaling file system. Do an untar and walk up to the SGI and
turn the power off. Do the same thing to your FreeBSD machine. Then time
the boot.
XFS includes striping and mirroring. Striped XFS file systems move data
at 500MB/sec. They have done so for years.
XFS is integrated with SGI's NFS. SGI's NFS has an extension, a freely
available under the GPL extension, that delivers 85MB/sec read or write
rate, over the wire, 1 process, single threaded, no async I/O. In other
words for (whatever) { read(fd, buf, 1<<20); }.
: how far from having working lfs we are, or does it work already? i think
: last time i asked about xfs i was told lfs "is getting there" but wasnt
: quite working...
LFS is a joke. Check out the old Usenix articles on it, there is one where
I made Berkeley publish what essentially amounts to a retraction of their
claims.
: also, if someone could provide me some stats how many files/sec xfs can
: write to disk compared to ufs, since i believe that's one of the ways to
: compare those two, xfs were, last time i heard, able to overperform ufs.
Sure can.
File & VM system latencies in microseconds - smaller is better
--------------------------------------------------------------
Host OS 0K File 10K File Mmap Prot Page
Create Delete Create Delete Latency Fault Fault
--------- ------------- ------ ------ ------ ------ ------- ----- -----
P5-133 FreeBSD 2.2-C 2857 1123 4000 3225 133 -1 0.0K
R10K IRIX64 6.2-no 374 389 353 387 55 -1 21.5K
About a factor of 10. The R10K is 2x the perf of the P5 but the FreeBSD
system is sitting idle waiting for the desk. An infinitely fast CPU
wouldn't help.
Don't get me wrong. I think free software is great. I think Matt is
one smart cookie, I'd love to hire him. Ditto for the FreeBSD team.
But make no mistake there is more to an OS than a simple minded file
system or a context switch. SGI's OS scales to 100s of CPUs, supports
more devices, and has more stuff that people with $$$ want. This is
serious software with serious people working on it. Do you want IRIX for
a desktop to read news? Hell no, install Linux or FreeBSD or whatever
on your 386 and you are done. If you have real work to do you may find
that you have to pay for your tools.
--
---
Larry McVoy lm@sgi.com http://reality.sgi.com/lm (415) 933-1804