Future of SCO UNIX

[Wm E. Davidsen Jr]

In article <T.-7497 at xds12.ferranti.com> karl at ficc.ferranti.com (Karl Lehenbauer) writes:

| >I may be crazy, but I think if they go with OSF/1 and
| >Mach (which is what it SEEMS like they are moving towards)
| >you will see a MUCH faster and better system than anyone
| >has seen sofar!
| 
| Prove it.  Or at least give us more to go on than your feelings.

  Well, let's see, from my uptime command:
==>   9:49pm  up 152 days, 21:09,  2 users,  load average: 0.09, 0.08, 0.34

  And from the sysstat:
  oops, can't mail curses output. Anyway, system time is 6.8%. And from
vmstat I note that system time peaks at about 30%, but 12-15 is typical.

  Why am I telling you this? Because you simply can't get a "MUCH
faster" system when the overhead is that low. You could get more by
faster i/o (I spend more time wait i/o than in kernel mode), but on a
typical system there is that much overhead to improve. You could get a
smaller kernel, but then the i/o buffers are bigger than the kernel
code in a tuned system, even with the V.4 kernel.

  There are advantages to mach, but with typical kernel CPU and size,
given $42/MB memory, I'm not about to switch because I can save one,
two, or even three MB of memory, or cut my kernel CPU, paging, or
whatever, in half.
-- 
bill davidsen - davidsen at sixhub.uucp (uunet!crdgw1!sixhub!davidsen)
    sysop *IX BBS and Public Access UNIX
    moderator of comp.binaries.ibm.pc and 80386 mailing list
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me