What is DF aimed at?

[Danial Thom]

--- Dmitri Nikulin <dnikulin at xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On 6/5/06, Danial Thom <danial_thom at xxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
> >
> >
> > --- Matthew Dillon
> <dillon at xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > :Uh, how do you get that? Clustering
> implies
> > > :networking, and Matt has repeatedly stated
> > > that
> > > :he doesn't really care about network
> > > performance.
> > > :
> > > :And clustering implies servers, which Matt
> has
> > > :recently and repeatedly stated aren't his
> > > focal
> > > :point. I don't see how you can have one as
> a
> > > goal
> > > :and not the other. Clustering required
> hightly
> > > :efficient networking first and foremost.
> > > :
> > > :DT
> > >
> > >     Er, I said no such thing.  You
> apparently
> > > did not read my
> > >     posting(s) very carefully.
> >
> > You said you only wanted "very good
> networking"
> > and that if you wanted to push traffic at the
> > bleeding edge you should get dedicated
> hardware
> > solutions from cisco.
> >
> > You know optimizing networking isn't such a
> bad
> > thing. You can have your cake and eat it too.
> > Having stellar networking performance will
> not
> > hurt your project, nor is it a "waste of
> time".
> > It would make your OS much more attractive to
> a
> > much wider user base. Even Intel gave in and
> > decided to build a CPU to win the benchmarks.
> > People want the best. No-one is going to
> notice
> > if you're 3rd best, but everyone will notice
> if
> > you're #1.
> 
> People use Linux and it's far from the best in
> security, stability and
> for many cases even performance. They use it
> because it does a lot and
> is marketable. Done. Quality doesn't matter
> otherwise it would never
> have left the garage.
> 
> Even so, optimizing every last possible drop
> from the network stack is
> *not* compatible with the goals of this
> project. For example, if you
> understand the LWKT system and Matt's
> presentation/emails regarding
> the way socket threads are distributed on
> multi-processor systems,
> you'll note that they're split by port and
> bound to that CPU for their
> lifetime. This means that load balancing is not
> as optimal as
> possible, since actual load is not factored in.
> However, work
> aggregation is a lot more successful, because
> migrations are costly.
> Also, the system itself is near lockless and,
> as far as localised
> network stacks go, impressively optimal
> already.
> 
> Since getting proper load balancing of the
> threads in would be counter
> to DragonFly's very architecture, and since
> that optimization itself
> has significant downsides and can actually make
> a pitifully small
> positive difference, there's no point
> optimizing to that extreme. This
> is an example, I'm sure Matt could conjure many
> more cases where the
> extra optimization just isn't worth it, but he
> has better things to
> do.
> 
> I don't know about "stellar" here. Let's wait
> until more of the kernel
> is MPSAFE, including the network stack, and do
> a bench set against a
> few instances of FreeBSD and Linux. I'd be more
> than happy to try it
> out, I've got some em (Intel gigabit) cards and
> an X2 4400+ and that's
> a nice start. You can try it on your millions
> of dollars worth of 10GE
> machines. Contribute to the project! You have
> money and obviously a
> lot of spare time, so help the project out
> instead of insulting its
> developers. That'll be a good deed and you may
> realise just how great
> this community is when you're not perceived as
> an ass bandit.
> 
>   -- Dmitri Nikulin
> 

It seems to me, that if your "methods" are sound,
that you should be able to beat FreeBsd and
linux. Why is that not a worthy goal? FreeBSD 4.x
with 1 processor beats linux with 2 by a wide
margine. How difficult can it be to simply be
better with 2 processors than Freebsd 4.x is with
one? Thats really the only criteria for getting
past the wall.

we all know that freebsd 5.x+ sucks. being better
than that shouldnt be something to reject.

Dt

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