*BSD News Article 91168


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From: Philippe CAUSSE <caussep@sphynx.fdn.fr>
Subject: Re: Linux vs BSD
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Date: Sun, 16 Mar 1997 09:34:00 GMT
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On Sun, 16 Mar 1997, Robert Brockway wrote:

> Not my real address (mhall@homecom.com) wrote:
> 
> : I'm not convinced running
> :   badblocks -w /dev/sda7 100000
> : on an about-to-be-added partition is "really stupid" but it brings Linux
> : 2.0.28 to its knees.  The system comes back when the command is done,
> : but while it's running Linux can't move mail or change consoles or anything.
> : Evidently the write buffer cache expands till there's no physical
> : memory left for init or shell.  Any command that tries to write a file
> : all at once that's much bigger than physical memory can do roughly the
> : same thing.
> 
> : Does FreeBSD have a similar weakness?

It doesn't seem to suffer from this problem...
I'm still running FreeBSD-2.1.6 and performing raw device I/O does not
lock the system at all.
The buffer cache management policy is basically different in BSD-ish
systems...

> I suspect all Unices would suffer about the same.  IO intensive activity,
> is IO intensive even regardless of the OS running.

Not quite right. It essentially affect SysV based OSes: the same trouble
happens under Solaris-2.5 and HP-UX.
BSD systems happen to feel less responsive when lightly loaded but behave
better under heavy load.

> 
> : My choice of Linux over FreeBSD was an accident: at the time I was giving
> : up on SCO I couldn't find any information about FreeBSD while alt.os.linux
> : was pretty busy.  How many advocates for one or the other will admit their
> : choice was similarly arbitrary?  Linux has served me well for almost five
> 
> Yep, mine was arbitrary, and was made the night before I went into the
> University to d/l the installation floppies.
> 
> : years.  I'll bet FreeBSD would have done just as well.  Let us not waste
> : a minute on "the circular firing squad" when the real enemy is The Dark
> : Side of the Force, in Redmond.
> 
> Agreed.  FreeBSD wold have served me just as well.
> 
> We must unite against the Evil Empire :-)
> Cheers,
> 	-Robert
> 
> --Robert Brockway. email: robert@zen.humbug.org.au (preferred)
>                           unrbrock@dingo.uq.edu.au, s316674@student.uq.edu.au
>                    WWW:   http://student.uq.edu.au/~s316674
> Computers: Can't live with them, can't play Quake without them.
> 
> 

Regards,
Philippe.

-------------------------------------------------------------------
P. Causse			http://www.fdn.fr/~pcausse
4.4BSD/X11R6/Motif-2.0/C++	mailto:caussep@sphynx.fdn.fr (UUCP)