3 ms·

Why I agree that the everything-is-a-file approach that Plan 9 takes is pretty great, and it would be great if that would find a greater use in Linux or the BSD

by mhd 16y ago

Why I agree that the everything-is-a-file approach that Plan 9 takes is pretty great, and it would be great if that would find a greater use in Linux or the BSDs (beyond /proc etc.), one has to take those comments about the size and quality of the code with a grain of salt. Once again, the last 20 percent of performance take 80 percent of the effort, and quite often about as much lines of code. And Linux/BSD had to be that highly optimized, or it would have failed in the server sector, probably wouldn't support as many architectures and weird hardware parts. Having said that, I guess that a lot of people would be happy with the level of support and speed Plan 9 supports, as hardware tends to merge (RIP MIPS, Sparc, 68k, PA-RISC, S3, Tseng, Token Ring…), and Moore's Law takes care of the rest.

supersillyus 16y ago
What you're saying makes sense to me, but do you have a citation for Plan9 being notably slower than Linux on equivalent hardware? Seems like it'd be trivially true unless there is a fantastic architectural advantage to plan9 somewhere, but I'd love to see some numbers.
- mhd 16y ago
  It's been a while since I lurked on 9fans (after all the late adopting minimalist tiling window manager fanboys started coming in in droves), so I can't give you any links to recent comparisons. First of all, the comparison would be pretty unscientific if you include all the different variables. So let's say you want to test common server performance, then you'd probably do something like an apache bench for a web server. Now comes the problem: Apart from the kernel issues (memory management, ethernet driver, scheduling), you'll have different web servers, compiled with different C compilers. The GCC port for Plan 9 is ancient, and I'm not aware that e.g. Apache is running on it. Yes, you can simply test page loads/second with any technology available to any platform, and if you buy into the fact that everything you're doing is wrong (so not just Plan 9 vs Linux, but also gcc vs. 8c, apache vs pegasus etc.), well…

by mhd 16y ago

supersillyus 16y ago

What you're saying makes sense to me, but do you have a citation for Plan9 being notably slower than Linux on equivalent hardware? Seems like it'd be trivially true unless there is a fantastic architectural advantage to plan9 somewhere, but I'd love to see some numbers.

mhd 16y ago
It's been a while since I lurked on 9fans (after all the late adopting minimalist tiling window manager fanboys started coming in in droves), so I can't give you any links to recent comparisons. First of all, the comparison would be pretty unscientific if you include all the different variables. So let's say you want to test common server performance, then you'd probably do something like an apache bench for a web server. Now comes the problem: Apart from the kernel issues (memory management, ethernet driver, scheduling), you'll have different web servers, compiled with different C compilers. The GCC port for Plan 9 is ancient, and I'm not aware that e.g. Apache is running on it. Yes, you can simply test page loads/second with any technology available to any platform, and if you buy into the fact that everything you're doing is wrong (so not just Plan 9 vs Linux, but also gcc vs. 8c, apache vs pegasus etc.), well…