Re: Alan Cox quote? (was: Re: accounting for threads)

Chris Ricker
2001-06-20T00:04:15Z

On Tue, 19 Jun 2001, David S. Miller wrote:

> <axe_grind>
>
> Don't believe me that Solaris sucks here? Run this experiment under
> Solaris-latest and Linux on a sparc64 system (using lmbench):
>
> Under Solaris: ./lat_proc fork
> Under Linux: strace -f ./lat_proc fork
>
> I bet the Linux case does better than the Solaris run by some orders
> of magnitude. That's how poor their fork/exit/switch code is.
>
> </axe_grind>

It's a very impressive difference:

Script started on Tue Jun 19 17:49:30 2001
[kaboom@thing2 linux]$ ./lat_proc fork
Process fork+exit: 563.7778 microseconds
[kaboom@thing2 linux]$ ./lat_proc fork
Process fork+exit: 565.5556 microseconds
[kaboom@thing2 linux]$ ./lat_proc fork
Process fork+exit: 568.0000 microseconds
[kaboom@thing2 linux]$ exit
Script done on Tue Jun 19 17:49:46 2001

Script started on Tue 19 Jun 2001 05:51:38 PM MDT
[kaboom@thing1 solaris]$ ./lat_proc fork
Process fork+exit: 4249.5000 microseconds
[kaboom@thing1 solaris]$ ./lat_proc fork
Process fork+exit: 4212.5000 microseconds
[kaboom@thing1 solaris]$ ./lat_proc fork
Process fork+exit: 4241.0000 microseconds
[kaboom@thing1 solaris]$ exit
script done on Tue 19 Jun 2001 05:52:19 PM MDT

thing1 and thing2 are identical Sun Blade 100s. thing1 is running Solaris 8
(04/01 release), while thing2 is running 2.4.4 (Debian/unstable).

later,
chris

--
Chris Ricker kaboom@gatech.edu
chris@gurulabs.com