On Sat, Oct 07, 2000 at 09:44:46PM -0700, Greywolf wrote:
> I have a question that's been kind of burning on me for a while now,
> and that is what in blazes are they doing that is giving the illusion
> that they run faster than we do on just about every platform?  They

Most comes from the filesystem I think: par of this is that the FS is
mounted async by default on linux (you can do so on NetBSD, but softdep
is a much better solution); part of this is their dynamically sized buffer
cache (something that UBC should solve, for now you can tweak NBUF/BUFPAGES).
On my desktop, using softdep and tweaking NBUF/BUFPAGES to use the RAM I
don't need for VM make NetBSD close to linux.

Now, I can tell you that under load, NetBSD is far better than linux,
especially when it start swapping.

> seem to be able to do the switchable console thing on every platform,
> including the SPARC, something we're still struggling with (largely
> due to licensing issues, it would seem).

They have MD code for each of this; additionnally I don't feel it a so
important thing :)

> Additionally, they seem to be able to have better performance talking to
> the graphics cards than we do.

Which graphic cards ? Maybe it's a X-related issue ?

--
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
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