Getting tired of 5.3

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 2:44 PM -0800 12/14/04, walt wrote:
I don't have any multi-processor machines (nor do I intend to
buy any) but the reason (IMHO) that FreeBSD-current has suffered
in The Responsiveness Wars is their approach to the SMP problem.
The Giant Kernel Lock problem has been preventing any real
progress for over a year (at least) and seems to be going
nowhere very fast.  Nobody, even ALC, seems to be able to
solve this horrible problem.
Well, I think that is overstating things a bit.  Many parts of
the system sped up very noticeably between 5.2-release and
5.3-release.  I am not sure if "user responsiveness" has, because
I (personally) do not use FreeBSD for my desktop.  I use it for
running some services, and for what are essentially "batch jobs".
SCHED_ULE was supposed to do a better job at user responsiveness,
but that new feature was still too unreliable for 5.3-release.
There have been many fixes to SCHED_ULE since then (only done in
6.x-current for now), but again I can't say how well it works wrt
user responsiveness.
I think it is not accurate to say things are "going nowhere".

--
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at xxxxxxxxxxx
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at xxxxxxx