Re: Minutes from Feb 21 LSE Call

Bill Huey
2003-02-24T07:50:44Z

On Sun, Feb 23, 2003 at 11:54:30PM -0800, William Lee Irwin III wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 23, 2003 at 11:44:47PM -0800, Bill Huey wrote:
> > And large unbounded operation on data structures. DOS, a single tasking
> > operating system is fast running a single thread of execution too, it just
> > happens to also be completely useless.
> > Whether folks like it or not, embedded RT is the future of Linux much more
> > so than any single NUMA machine that's sold or can be sold by IBM, SGI and
> > any other vendor of that type.
>
> And scalability is as essential there as it is on 512x/16TB O2K's.
>
> For this, it's _downward_ scalability, where "downward" is relative to
> "typical" UP x86 boxen.

The good thing about Linux is that, with some compile options, stuff (scalability)
can be insert and removed and any time. One shouldn't narrow their view of how an
OS can be out of a strict tradition.

I don't buy this spinlock-for-all-locking things tradition with no preemption,
especially given some of the IO performance improvement that happened as a courtesy
of preempt. Some how that was forgotten in Larry's discussion.

bill