Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2001 22:46:41 -0500 From: Seth Leigh <seth@pengar.com> To: freebsd-smp@FreeBSD.org Subject: What about Solaris? Message-ID: <5.0.2.1.0.20010214223500.01b83950@hobbiton.shire.net>
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I know I have been subscribed to this list for years, but as a non-contributer to FreeBSD (at least not yet) I don't always pay attention to it. I do know that in the past I have seen some posts where people dissed Solaris, calling it Slowaris, posting benchmarks showing Solaris systems being outperformed by the same machine running Linux, FreeBSD, or what have you. I am just curious what people think about Solaris. I wouldn't be surprised to find that a single-cpu Solaris system would be outperformed by the same level of hardware running FreeBSD or Linux. For heaven's sake, Solaris has been architected for extreme scalability, including very fine granularity of locking within the kernel, preemptible kernel, interupt threads, etc. With all that lock overhead, I don't doubt the uniprocessor Solaris machine sacrifices some performance for a uniform code base. Didn't I just read that FreeBSD-SMP is just about ready actually to have some kernel code no longer protected by the Big Giant Lock? My guess would be that Solaris could likely be outperformed on a single or possible even a dual-cpu machine running such a non-scalable OS. My guess is that if you slap FreeBSD-SMP, Linux, or what have you, on a 4-way box you will start to see Solaris overtake the other ones. And if you can find an 8-way box that can run FreeBSD or Linux and Solaris, I think I would have to be very surprised if the Solaris system didn't spank the other two. Consider that Solaris works fine on up to a 64-cpu machine right now, and machines with more cpus are probably right around the corner. People run Solaris on machines with 12, or 24, or whatever, cpus all the time, and it works great. I guess I have just been doing a lot of thinking about Solaris recently because I have been reading the most excellent book "Solaris Internals: Core Kernel Architecture" by Jim Mauro and Richard McDougall. I have been extremely impressed by what appears to my fairly-new-to-operating-system-theory mind to be a very well thought out, well implemented, highly scaleable architecture. And then I think back to the posts I have seen in the past where folks raked Solaris over the coals, and I have to wonder, what is it about Solaris that people don't like? What technically bothers someone about Solaris as opposed to something like Linux or FreeBSD? This isn't supposed to be a troll post, I am honestly interested in what people think. Seth Leigh To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-smp" in the body of the message
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