Seen on Linux Weekly News. Ext4 maintainer Ted Ts’o has responded with a rare (for the kernel community) admission that technical concerns are not the sole driver of feature-merging decisions: It’s something I do worry about; and I do share your
why microkernels don’t work
Shocking advances in Operating Systems
And here I was complaining about the lack of progress in OS development “This will blow away any RTOS,” said Cauchy. “We speed up execution by doing things like vector interrupts, I/O memory mapping, and turning off timers.” By Gad!
Microsoft by the numbers
From correspondent AY: 150,000,000 Number of Windows 7 licenses sold, making Windows 7 by far the fastest growing operating system in history. <10 Percentage of US netbooks running Windows in 2008. 96 Percentage of US netbooks running Windows in 2009.
Linux semaphores
Re: Schedule idle MOLNAR Ingo (mingo@chiara.csoma.elte.hu) Wed, 11 Nov 1998 04:09:32 +0100 (CET) […] > _please_ We can do better than this. Only semaphores (not spinlocks) need > to have the priority inheritance. […] nope there are _not_ only semaphores,
multicore and multiprocessor performance
Here’s two interesting tables Percentage of lock acquisitions for global TCP/IP locks that do not succeed immediately. OS Type 6 conns 192 conns 16384 conns MsgP 89 100 100 ConnP-L(4) 60 56 52 ConnP-L(8) 51 30 26 ConnP-L(16) 49 18
The ridiculous GPL-only tagging of Linux
Imagine that you release software under a license that is primarily concerned with making sure that modifiable source code is available to all and that no restrictions should ever be placed on derived works. Now imagine that someone takes a
10th anniversary of the RTLinux Manifesto paper
The RTLinux* Manifesto was published a little over 10 years ago at the 5th Linux Expo in Raleigh North Carolina which was really the first one with a bunch of suits wandering around. As a kind of celebration/experiment , I’m
Parallelism and multicore
The goal of modern processor chip design has changed from optimizing various speed/price/heat tradeoffs for applications to finding excuses for dumping more transistors into the device. Heard an interesting talk from Krisztián Flautner of ARM at the ACISC conference and
Deterministic multithreading
An interesting paper appearing in ASPLOS proceedings provides a “deterministic” locking method Kendo enforces a deterministic interleaving of lock acquisitions and specially declared non-protected reads through a novel dynamically load-balanced deterministic scheduling algorithm. The algorithm tracks the progress of each