Re: Minutes from Feb 21 LSE Call

Ben Greear
2003-02-22T22:34:15Z

Mark Hahn wrote:
>>OK, so now you've slid from talking about PCs to 2-way to 4-way ...
>>perhaps because your original arguement was fatally flawed.
>
>
> oh, come on. the issue is whether memory is fast and flat.
> most "scalability" efforts are mainly trying to code around the fact
> that any ccNUMA (and most 4-ways) is going to be slow/bumpy.
> it is reasonable to worry that optimizations for imbalanced machines
> will hurt "normal" ones. is it worth hurting uni by 5% to give
> a 50% speedup to IBM's 32-way? I think not, simply because
> low-end machines are more important to Linux.
>
> the best way to kill Linux is to turn it into an OS best suited
> for $6+-digit machines.

Linux has a key feature that most other OS's lack: It can (easily, and by all)
be recompiled for a particular architecture. So, there is no particular reason why
optimizing for a high-end system has to kill performance on uni-processor
machines.

For instance, don't locks simply get compiled away to nothing on
uni-processor machines?

--
Ben Greear <greearb@candelatech.com> <Ben_Greear AT excite.com>
President of Candela Technologies Inc http://www.candelatech.com
ScryMUD: http://scry.wanfear.com http://scry.wanfear.com/~greear