On 18 Jan 2010, at 10:43 pm, cinap_lenrek@gmx.de wrote:

> i think a lot of the slowdown comes from that linux was not
> streamlined its userspace, but the userspace just got more and more
> complicated and does tons of redundant stuff...  what they did then
> was not to fix userspace, but they optimized the kernel to cache
> anything...
>
> look at some typical syscall traces...  tons of files are stat()ed...
> multiple times...  it opens unix domain sockets to talk to a not
> existant ldap name service or something...  tons of shared libraries
> are loaded...  and that is all before even your main() entry is gets
> called...
>
> linuxemu doesnt shortcut these things...  i cant reuse the shared
> library mmaps on exec ect...  i think walks are not cached in plan9,
> so you have to talk to your fileserver.
>
> the syscall overhead is just one of the bottlenecks of linux emulation
> and you would have to put tons of more crap in the kernel to get
> mozilla or opera working...  and even more to get it half as fast as
> in linux.
>
> just keep plan9 small and simple.

Indeed! I doubt I'd be interested in looking at a plan-9-turned-into-
linux kernel ever! :)

You got me wondering how much could be cached in linuxemu. Would a
cache server filesystem make sense?


--
http://xkcd.com/676/

Ethan Grammatikidis
eekee57@fastmail.fm