[SGVLUG] Microsoft Reports OSS Unix Beats Windows XP

[Dustin]

On Sat, 12 Nov 2005, Michael Proctor-Smith wrote:

> Actually they test Linux vs. FreeBSD vs. MS-Windows vs.
> Singularity(Research OS).

Yeah, I just got there and was going to send on a note--they do compare
with regular Win XP eventually.  it's buried three quarters of the way
through on p31, if anyone is interested.

> things. But the tests are very windows centric (userspace pthreads) 
> on Linux/FreeBSD, windows threads on windows. If the tests were done
> The Unix Way. The test would have probably come out differently.

They did say kernel threads performed worse.

Unix, the fork-and-exec OS, creates processes faster than MS-Windows.  I'm 
so shocked....

AFAICT much of the focus of the research is how much of the hardware
support for memory management and context switching you can discard by 
relying on automatic code verification instead.  That may be the reason 
for some of the good performance they saw.

In any case, it's a research project that will never be commercialized, 
with all that that implies.

Dustin