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

[Nick Withers]

On Thu, 13 Jul 2006 08:22:03 -0700 (PDT)
Danial Thom <danial_thom at yahoo.com> wrote:

> 
> --- Head in the sand Jerry mumbled:

Just thought I should metion that this comes across as rude to
me... but maybe that's just me!

> > > --- 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

Would you mind providing a source for that information? I would
not be at all surprised to hear that a FreeBSD 6.x
dual-CPU set-up provides less than twice the performance as that
of a single CPU FreeBSD 6.x set-up, but I will happily eat my
own (mighty tasty) hat if a dual CPU FreeBSD 6.x set-up
performs worse than a single FreeBSD 6.x set-up. That having
been said, I tend to treat Robert Watson's word as gospel, but
I'd like to see it in a form I can trust (honestly, no offense
intended!) first (i.e., please provide a source for your
information :-)).

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

Could you provide me with a source here (Not trying to be rude,
but I'd be really interested in reading about this)?

> Simply enabling SMP on a single processor system
> adds 20-25% overhead in freebsd 6.1.

Whilst I have trouble accepting these particular figures, I
don't doubt that there is *some* overhead in dealing with
multiple CPUs, from a kernel perspective.

> 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.

Please see "http://www.dragonflybsd.org/about/team.cgi". My
maths ain't great (alright, it's terrible!) but I count more
than one committer. I'm probably just misunderstanding what
you're trying to say here...

> Its prima facie evidence that IQ isn't cumulative.
> 
> DT

Sorry if this appears stand-off-ish - I don't mean it do be! I
do have a bias in favour of what I see as the best OS ever,
though (better that MacOS 7.5.3, even! :-))
-- 
Nick Withers
email: nick at nickwithers.com
Web: http://www.nickwithers.com
Mobile: +61 414 397 446