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A better title: a pathological test program meant for Linux does not trigger pathological behavior on OpenBSD

• apgwoz 1y ago
  Surely you must be new to tedu posts…
  • ameliaquining 1y ago
    Still worth avoiding having the HN thread be about whether OpenBSD is in general faster than Linux. This is a thing I've seen a bunch of times recently, where someone gives an attention-grabbing headline to a post that's actually about a narrower and more interesting technical topic, but then in the comments everyone ignores the content and argues about the headline.
    • st_goliath 1y ago
      > This is a thing I've seen a bunch of times recently ... > ... in the comments everyone ignores the content and argues about the headline. Surely you must be new to Hacker News…
      • ameliaquining 1y ago
        It was more that there were a couple of particularly frustrating recent examples that happened to come to my attention. Of course this has always been a problem.
    • chasil 1y ago
      As I understand it, OpenBSD is similar to Linux 2.2 architecturally in that there is a lock that prevents (most) kernel code from running on more than one (logical) CPU at once. We do hear that some kernel system calls have moved out from behind the lock over time, but anything requiring core kernel functionality must wait until the kernel is released from all other CPUs. The kernel may be faster in this exercise, but is potentially a constrained resource on a highly loaded system. This approach is more secure, however.
      • cenamus 1y ago
        Yeah they're making progress in unlocking most syscalls at the moment, but as far as I understand they're still some ways behind FreeBSD
        • Gud 1y ago
          FreeBSD removed their “lock” decades ago.
          • chasil 1y ago
            I believe BSDi, the entity in the AT&T lawsuit in the 90s, did the work.
            • chasil 1y ago
              "The SMPng Project relied heavily on the support of BSDi, who provided reference source code from the fine-grained SMP implementation found in BSD/OS. https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?smp https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?smp
          • loeg 1y ago
            I believe this was FreeBSD 5 (2003), yes.
    • its-summertime 1y ago
      I don't think I'd ever want someone to consider the hacker news audience when writing a post
      • dwedge 1y ago
        A company I used to work at would write posts, put it on hacker news, post the HN link in slack and ask everyone with an account to upvote it
        • frou_dh 1y ago
          I'm guessing the HN backend detects "voting rings" like that who often vote together.