Re: Getting tired of 5.3

[Garance A Drosihn <drosih@xxxxxxx>]

At 2:44 PM -0800 12/14/04, walt wrote:
> I don't have any multi-processor machines (nor do I intend to
> buy any) but the reason (IMHO) that FreeBSD-current has suffered
> in The Responsiveness Wars is their approach to the SMP problem.
>
> The Giant Kernel Lock problem has been preventing any real
> progress for over a year (at least) and seems to be going
> nowhere very fast.  Nobody, even ALC, seems to be able to
> solve this horrible problem.

Well, I think that is overstating things a bit.  Many parts of
the system sped up very noticeably between 5.2-release and
5.3-release.  I am not sure if "user responsiveness" has, because
I (personally) do not use FreeBSD for my desktop.  I use it for
running some services, and for what are essentially "batch jobs".

SCHED_ULE was supposed to do a better job at user responsiveness,
but that new feature was still too unreliable for 5.3-release.
There have been many fixes to SCHED_ULE since then (only done in
6.x-current for now), but again I can't say how well it works wrt
user responsiveness.

I think it is not accurate to say things are "going nowhere".

--
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad@xxxxxxxxxxx
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih@xxxxxxx