About the UP vs SMP vs 2Gb vs 4Gb versions of
the kernel...
I've watched linux grow from a minixy start to
where we are looking for global domination :-).
Early, we had uniprocessor machines, then
came SMP in a shakey way, but now we expect SMP
to provide at least as reliable machine as UP.
I run SMP kernels on my UP machines alright.
I've heard that SMP kernels are slightly slower
than UP, but as far as I am aware that is the only
drawback nowadays. Maybe we should think about
dropping the UP support, and running on UP
machines as single processor SMP. The odd percent
slowdown is lost as a couple of weeks of Moores
Law and maybe we could reduce the complexity of
the kernel on the back of it?
I would be keen for a single size fits all, the
hardware vendors that like binary modules would also
like binary compatibility across a release.
Maybe I should have donned a flame-retardant
suit :-) I can see that keeping a source-level
module compatibility suits some political requirements
of some people on the kernel channel, but if
binary compatibility is achievable at a low enough
cost then the reduced "TCO" for both hardware
vendors, module writers and the masses helps our move
onto the desktop.
Tim Towers
P.S.
Wild idea : Remember the old Microsoft idea of fat
applications (back when they did more than just
Intel) - maybe we could coax gcc to cross-compile
applications for i32/alpha/sparc etc to some heavily
extended elf format and then we could have single
releases of applications. Of course it would suck
diskspace like theres no tomorrow, but It'd help
the non-intel crowd that don't like compiling things.
(This method works over NFS, unlike including <x>
RPM's for each architecture in a meta-rpm and only
extracting a subset)
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com> wrote in message
news:<Pine.LNX.4.10.9910160947020.1736-100000@penguin.transmeta.com>...
...
> I kind of like the notion of having SMP and UP modules co-exist nicely,
> but I do not enjoy the thought of then adding other random differences
> too.. SMP vs UP is kind of fundamental, while 1G vs 2G definitely isn't.
>
> Linus
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