Re: Minutes from Feb 21 LSE Call

[Ben Greear]

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 <[e-mail]>       <Ben_Greear AT excite.com>
President of Candela Technologies Inc      http://www.candelatech.com
ScryMUD:  http://scry.wanfear.com     http://scry.wanfear.com/~greear