Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 20:13:50 09/01/03
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On August 31, 2003 at 20:38:23, Russell Reagan wrote: >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 >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 >terms of SMP support. > >Which operating systems are preferred? As a general rule, you don't get to choose. IE if you buy a sun, you are probably going to be stuck with Solaris. If you buy a Cray, you are going to be using Unicos. Etc... > >Which operating systems should be avoided? > I personally don't like Solaris, as it is pretty clunky overall. However it does seem to work, although Sun hardware is horribly slow by any reasonable measure. >How is Windows? Seems to work fine. > >How is FreeBSD? I heard Gian-Carlo saying something about FreeBSD not having >good multithreaded support. > No idea on BSD. >If Linux has sub-par SMP support, will this be improved in kernel 2.6? Linux does fine on SMP support. Newer kernels are addressing the scalability issue, but for reasonable numbers of processors (I have run on machines running linux with up to 16 processors) it works fine.
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