Re: Solaris 2.6 and Linux
Darren Reed (darrenr@cyber.com.au)
Fri, 26 Sep 1997 23:13:56 +1000 (EST)
In some mail I received from Ricky Beam, sie wrote
>
> Letting the chips fall where they may, I quote Felix Schroeter:
> ...
> >This is an unfair comparision, because Solaris writes out metadata
> >synchronously and Linux asynchronously.
> >
> >Write those 100000 files on Linux and turn off the power in the
> >middle of the process. Do the same on the Solaris box. And then
> >look what fsck does on both boxes...
>
> Don't give me any of that BS, they'll both go nuts if the write back cache
> is not pushed to the disk. That sparc5 is a primary news server. It has
> 4*4Gig FWD drives attached to it. On many occassions (more than I care
> to count) it has crashed and taken hours (and once three days) to make the
> filesystem(s) stable. The three day down time was the result of a crash
> during the fastrm cycle of expire -- several 100,000 files now half deleted.
>
> And, I have done your power down test on a caching raid system (linux). With
> 30+Meg of filesystem data not physically pushed to the disks, e2fsck repaired
> the damage in about 6hours after 15 iterations.
Hmmm, did you say you had those 4*4GB on the Solaris in RAID configuration
too ? Comparing apples and oranges isn't fair, but these are interesting
data points none the less.
> But, you are right, it is an unfair comparision as Solaris is a slow piece of
> crap. It has been from the get-go... until 2.5, is was laughably slow.
It might be slow, but I'd much rather develop kernel stuff for Solaris than
Linux, source code or no. You guys are still sorting out what to do with
symbols from LKM's! At least stuff developed for Solaris (i.e STREAMS using
DDI/DDK) has a good chance of working on another platform. I hate to remind
you folks but "Linux ain't Unix" (hmm, that will really stir up some flames).
/usr/include/* is so different, it's just not funny. You have no idea how
discouraging that huge difference is to someone who works with the *BSD
platforms and other commercial Unixes 99% of the time. Maybe that's why
its fast and I guess its a price you're all willing to pay.