Are hardware vendors starting to bail on FreeBSD ... ?

[Danial Thom]

--- Head in the sand Jerry mumbled:

> > --- Francisco Reyes <lists at stringsutils.com>
> > wrote:
> > 
> > > Marc G. Fournier writes:
> > > 
> > > > the problem is that none of the Tier 1
> > > hardware manufacturer's support 
> > > > FreeBSD, and a growing number of places
> (ie.
> > > Adaptec / Intel) appear to be 
> > > > dropping support for it as well ...
> > > 
> > > But companies like 3Ware and Areca are
> > > supporting it and from what I see on 
> > > the lists, people are voting with their
> money
> > > in their favor.
> > 
> > Mainly because they had drivers that required
> > little modification from previous versions.
> Intel
> > has a few other things on their plate,
> releasing
> > more processors to bail out Freebsd's paltry
> > performance, so give them a break.
> > 
> > How long are vendors supposed to wait for the
> > FreeBSD developers to deliver the performance
> > they've claimed that they can deliver? I know
> > several network appliance vendors all stuck
> on
> > FreeBSD 4, because 5 and 6 are a step
> backwards
> > performance-wise. Now they're saying 7 will
> be
> > the one. 
> > 
> > FreeBSD is the OS that cried "WOLF", and the
> > vendors are starting to ignore the calls. The
> > infrastructure is so poor (in terms of
> process
> > switching times and scheduler efficiencies),
> and
> > they seem clueless on how to fix it.
> 
> Must be a troll.
> FreeBSD performance is not what holds it back.
> It competes well with others out there.
> 
> ////jerry

No it doesn't, Jerry. Even Robert Watson, who
spends most of his time on performance issues,
readily admits that 

- FreeBSD 6 is faster with 1 processor than 2
- FreeBSD 6 is slower with 1 processor than
Freebsd 4.x

The process switch times are 2-4x slower than on
linux. Thats not 2-4%, thats 200-400% slower. 

Simply enabling SMP on a single processor system
adds 20-25% overhead in freebsd 6.1. Again,
readily admitted/accepted by the developers.
There is no way to recover that in efficiency, at
least not for a long time.

What's really frightening is that Dragonfly is
going to shed the giant lock before Freebsd, and
there's only one guy working on it. Its prima
facie evidence that IQ isn't cumulative.

DT

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