Re: the evil interrupt stats monster is still around!

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Jul 28, 2007 at 12:14:30PM -0700, Matthew Dillon wrote:
>     I would rather not try to optimize programs to use vfork().  There
>     just isn't a whole lot of difference between fork and vfork.

When NetBSD implemented a real vfork back around NetBSD 1.4 or so, it
made difference in the percent range for a full buildworld. Basically,
you can avoid the duplication of the VM space *and* the COW faulting,
which sums up.

>     The GNU configure script crap is just that... crap.  In a typical
>     pkgsrc build that script will probably be run thousands of times,
>     doing the same tests with slow shell scripts over and over and over
>     and over and over and over again.  It's really the stupidest gnu thing
>     I've ever seen in my life.  It was stupid a decade ago, and its still
>     stupid today.

While a lot of bad things can be said about autoconf, it was the only
usable, semi-generic solution for over a decade. There is still only
*one* good alternative (and that is using C++...). The biggest complain
most maintainers on non-default (from the upstream POV) platform had in
all that time was that it is hard to use correctly. E.g. many tests can
be done a lot more intelligently than most configure scripts do. Given
that autoconf follows the "stand-alone" paradigm (as opposed to imake
for some parts of the problem domain), it actually implements it quite
well.

Joerg