Solaris Fire Engine.

[Donald Becker]

On Mon, 20 Oct 2003, Mof wrote:

> http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/61/33440.html
> 
> ... "We worked hard on efficiency, and we now measure, at a given network 
> workload on identical x86 hardware, we use 30 percent less CPU than Linux."

Linux uses much more CPU per packet than it used to.  The structural
change for IPtable/IPchains capability is very expensive, even when it
is not used.  And there have been substantial, CPU-costly changes to protect
against denial-of-service attacks at many levels.  The only protocol
stack changes that might benefit cluster use are sendfile/zero-copy, and
that doesn't apply to most current hardware or typical cluster message
passing.

I would be technially easy to revert to the interface of old Linux
kernels and see much better than a 30% CPU reduction, but it's very
unlikely that would happen politically: Linux development is
feature-driven, not performance-driven.  And that's easy to understand
when your pet feature is at stake, or there is a news story of "Linux
Kernel Vulnerable to <obscure attack #452844>".



-- 
Donald Becker				becker at scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
914 Bay Ridge Road, Suite 220		Scyld Beowulf cluster system
Annapolis MD 21403			410-990-9993

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