Linux vs FreeBSD, and other *NIXes

[Jerry Feldman]

I don't have figures, but Linux does not scale well above 4 CPUs. Most 
commercial Unixes are designed to scale.

David Kramer wrote:
> So does anyone have *recent* facts or anecdotes about the technical merits 
> of one over the other?
> 
> Historically, FreeBSD has had a more secure and debugged TCP/IP stack, but 
> I haven't heard that claim in a while.
> 
> This is really a scaled-down "cathedral and bazaar" experiment, as linux 
> is developed by thousands with very little official oversite, while BSD is 
> guarded by a smaller group.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> In line with some other discussions on this list. from a 
> performance/scalability/reliability perspective, the areas that 
> differentiate *NIXes the most are:
> - Scheduling
> - Memory management
> - Filesystem scheme (when to write, how much to read, etc)
> 
> One of the reasons Sun did so well in the past is that they had excellent 
> scheduling schemes.  In fact, it was replaceable, so you could change the 
> scheduling scheme to suit your purposes.  As I understand it, Linux's 
> scheduler is one of it's weaknesses, and a reason it benefits so much from 
> multiprocessors.  Dunno about FreeBSD.
> 
> AIX played freakish games with memory management.  The upside is that
> memory management is very efficient and usually sucessful.  The downside
> is that memory is constantly borrowed from disk cache to heap to shared
> libraries so it's hard to know exactly how much memory is actually free.
> 
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
> DDDD   David Kramer                           http://thekramers.net
> DK KD  "That venture capitalists are willing to take any level of
> DKK D  risk, even a modest one, after all that has happened in the
> DK KD  ecommerce sector, is inspiring.  They might almost be
> DDDD   capable of becoming Red Sox fans"               -Keith Regan
> 
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-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
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