Re: Minutes from Feb 21 LSE Call

From: Ben Greear (greearb@candelatech.com)
Date: Sat Feb 22 2003 - 17:44:18 EST


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

- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Feb 23 2003 - 22:00:36 EST