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I know they bypass the kernel but my point still stands, most of the servers on the internet runs on Linux, that's a fact, so there was more money, time investe

by Thaxll 3y ago

I know they bypass the kernel but my point still stands, most of the servers on the internet runs on Linux, that's a fact, so there was more money, time invested, man power on that OS than any others.

dijit 3y ago
Your point is that popularity means that it will improve. This is true, to a point. Counterpoint: Windows Desktop Experience. EDIT: that comment was glib, let me do a proper counterpoint. Common area's are some of the most least maintained in reality; I can think of meet-me-rooms or central fibre hubs in major cities; they are expensive and subject to a lot of the whims of the major provider. Crucially, despite large amounts of investment, the underlying architecture or infrastructure remains, even if the entire fabric of the area changes around it. Most providers using these kind of common areas do everything they can to avoid touching the area itself, especially as after a while it becomes very difficult to navigate and politically charged. Fundamentally the architecture of Linux's network stack, really is, "good enough", which is almost worse than you would originally think since "good enough" means there's no reason to look there. There is an old parable about "worse is better" because if something is truly broken people will put effort into fixing it. Linux's networking stack is fine, it's just not quite as good an architecture as the FreeBSD one. FreeBSD one has a lot less attention on it but fundamentally it's a cleaner implementation and easier to get much more out of.. You will find the same argument ad infinitum regarding other subjects such as Epoll vs IOCP vs kqueue (Epoll was abysmally terrible though and ended up being replaced by IO_URING, but even that took over a decade)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Thaxll 3y ago
  Yes things improve where we're talking about multi billions $ of infra cost. Linux is not your "random on the side" feature that is good enough.
  - dijit 3y ago
    To start with: it's not that much infra cost. Especially since you don't even know what you're attempting to optimise for. Latency? p99 of linux is fine, nobody is going to care that the request took 300μs longer. Even in aggregate across a huge fleet of machines waiting an extra 3ms is totally, totally fine. Throughput? you'll bottleneck on something else most likely anyway, getting a storage array to hydrate at line rate for 100GBPs is difficult and anyway you want to do authentication and distribution of chunks and metadata operations anyway? right? You're forgetting that it's likely an additional cost of a couple million dollars per year in absolute hardware to solve that issue with throughput, which is, in TCO terms, a couple of developers. Engineering effort to replace the foundation of an OS? Probably an order of magnitude more. Definitely contains a significant amount more risk, and the potential risk of political backlash for upheaving some other companies workflow that is weird. Hardware isn't so expensive really. Of course, you could just bypass the kernel with much less effort and avoid all of this shit entirely.

by Thaxll 3y ago

dijit 3y ago

Your point is that popularity means that it will improve. This is true, to a point. Counterpoint: Windows Desktop Experience. EDIT: that comment was glib, let me do a proper counterpoint. Common area's are some of the most least maintained in reality; I can think of meet-me-rooms or central fibre hubs in major cities; they are expensive and subject to a lot of the whims of the major provider. Crucially, despite large amounts of investment, the underlying architecture or infrastructure remains, even if the entire fabric of the area changes around it. Most providers using these kind of common areas do everything they can to avoid touching the area itself, especially as after a while it becomes very difficult to navigate and politically charged. Fundamentally the architecture of Linux's network stack, really is, "good enough", which is almost worse than you would originally think since "good enough" means there's no reason to look there. There is an old parable about "worse is better" because if something is truly broken people will put effort into fixing it. Linux's networking stack is fine, it's just not quite as good an architecture as the FreeBSD one. FreeBSD one has a lot less attention on it but fundamentally it's a cleaner implementation and easier to get much more out of.. You will find the same argument ad infinitum regarding other subjects such as Epoll vs IOCP vs kqueue (Epoll was abysmally terrible though and ended up being replaced by IO_URING, but even that took over a decade)

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Thaxll 3y ago
Yes things improve where we're talking about multi billions $ of infra cost. Linux is not your "random on the side" feature that is good enough.
- dijit 3y ago
  To start with: it's not that much infra cost. Especially since you don't even know what you're attempting to optimise for. Latency? p99 of linux is fine, nobody is going to care that the request took 300μs longer. Even in aggregate across a huge fleet of machines waiting an extra 3ms is totally, totally fine. Throughput? you'll bottleneck on something else most likely anyway, getting a storage array to hydrate at line rate for 100GBPs is difficult and anyway you want to do authentication and distribution of chunks and metadata operations anyway? right? You're forgetting that it's likely an additional cost of a couple million dollars per year in absolute hardware to solve that issue with throughput, which is, in TCO terms, a couple of developers. Engineering effort to replace the foundation of an OS? Probably an order of magnitude more. Definitely contains a significant amount more risk, and the potential risk of political backlash for upheaving some other companies workflow that is weird. Hardware isn't so expensive really. Of course, you could just bypass the kernel with much less effort and avoid all of this shit entirely.