*BSD News Article 92255


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From: lm@neteng.engr.sgi.com (Larry McVoy)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.sys.sgi.misc
Subject: Re: no such thing as a "general user community"
Followup-To: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.sys.sgi.misc
Date: 28 Mar 1997 05:25:49 GMT
Organization: Silicon Graphics Inc., Mountain View, CA
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Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:37995 comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:6495 comp.sys.sgi.misc:29502

Mikhail Teterin (mi@rtfm.ziplink.net) wrote:
: From what I can see, this demonstrates the superiority of hardware,
: rather then OS. We don't even see what kind of disk/adapter was
: used on the machines (IDE? :)

The problem is that FreeBSD (really FFS) uses sync writes to maintain
constency on the disk, it has to, that's the way FFS is designed.

XFS uses a log to maintain constency.  It's a lot faster.

Linux just punts.  It's the fastest but the most likely to screw you.  
The Linux guys swear I'm wrong but I don't believe it.

XFS really is the best here - reliable and fast.  It's also 45K lines of
code.  Sigh.

: Not that I disagree competely, but the free Unices are stepping on
: Big Vendors...

If _one_ free Unix would step on all vendors, I'd love it.  In fact I
actively campaign to make that happen.  I happen to have choosen Linux
because of various reasons but I'm a whore for unification.  If there
was a greater chance that FreeBSD could unify the Unix world so that we
could take some market share away from NT, I'd be a FreeBSD bigot.
--
---
Larry McVoy     lm@sgi.com     http://reality.sgi.com/lm     (415) 933-1804