Author: Martin Andersen
Date: 03:47:27 09/01/03
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On September 01, 2003 at 00:47:49, Matthew Hull wrote: >On August 31, 2003 at 20:38:23, Russell Reagan wrote: 4x, but he said that anything higher than that and you should use something like >>Solaris, and gave the impression that Solaris was a very solid choice for an SMP >>machine. >> >>I was suprised that he said this, because (IIRC) Dr. Hyatt uses Redhat Linux, >>and he doesn't seem to think very highly of Sun, and he obviously knows a >>"little" about all things SMP ;-) >> >>I have a few questions in regards to how different operating systems compare in> >>In a unix system administration class today, the professor said that the SMP >>support in Linux isn't very good. He said it's okay if you're doing 2x or maybe >> >>terms of SMP support. >> >>Which operating systems are preferred? >> >>Which operating systems should be avoided? >> >>How is Windows? >> >>How is FreeBSD? I heard Gian-Carlo saying something about FreeBSD not having >>good multithreaded support. >> >>If Linux has sub-par SMP support, will this be improved in kernel 2.6? > > >I am by no means an expert, but it's my impression that Linux does fine with >4-way, certainly as well as any other *nix. But I get the impression that >though it can scale to 16, one would in fact do better with AIX or Solaris at >the moment. Of course, Linux will catch up in time, though there has not been >much incentive up to now to improve SMP in Linux beyond 4-way, there being a >paucity of affordable systems for which it could take advantage. The biggest >reason is that if you can afford a 16-way or higher, Solaris is provided >practically gratis. You biggest cost is the hardware, not the OS, so using >Linux would not save money. That's about the extent of my understanding (or >mis-understanding). > >MH Actually Linux 2.4.x scales very well on 2 and 4 CPU systems, and the upcoming 2.6 kernel will scale as well as any UNIX system, on systems with 8 or 16 CPU's, according to IBM. IBM has done and will do a lot of work in this field, to improve Linux scalability. How Linux runs on systems with more than 4 cpu's is not really relevant for other than large companies and scientific research. This is probably off-topic in this chess-forum :-) Linux scalability: http://www.esj.com/news/article.asp?EditorialsID=495 Martin.
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