CPU Affinity, was RE: [Zope] Linux vs. UNIX vs. BSD

[Tim Hoffman]

Hi Sean

Ok, I'll bite ;-) (I am biased though, I worked for Sun for 7 years in
the 90's)

The fact is many of the gnu tools predate much of linux, and I would
suggest many of them where actually developed on sunos and solaris ;-)

They all share the same heritage.

But yes you are correct, many of the gnu tools are pretty much mandatory
on any Unix installation.

But having said that, each time I upgrade redhat on my notebook, I end
up installing an enormous bunch of additional stuff, that redhat don't 
include on the CD's/standard distribution.

I use linux and solaris and both have areas which they could improve
mightily on.

On Wed, 2002-08-21 at 21:44, sean.upton@uniontrib.com wrote:
> Sigh... I always thought Solaris was an exercise in feature-broken command
> line tools (want to try unpackaging Zope without GNU tar anyone) ;)  The
> first thing most sysadmins do is make Solaris act/look more like Linux by
> installing boatloads of GNUish tools (bash,gcc,vim,tar,gzip), so if all that
> is left is a kernel, it sort of defeats the point of the hassle (assuming
> you could get the same with one build of a patched Linux kernel).

Actually there is a bunch of stuff in the core solaris, in areas of
process control, tuning, which linux doesn't come close too etc.. also
solaris doesn't require things like kernel rebuilds when you add you
drivers/hardware, which makes me stay with solaris over linux in many 
production server cases.

The basic gnuish tools as you put it, aren't the be all and end all of
the OS.

I do lament the slower mhz rating and the apparent slower running of
python, due to lower mhz.  

My last dig, is I still believe (personal experience) the hardware is
far more stable than the average intel kit installed ;-) 


> 
> Unless patching and/or replacing all of user-space is easier than a kernel
> build?  Perhaps if Sun adapted Debian's APT to support its pkg format (about
> as likely as typing 'apt-get install msword' on my Windows box, I'd say)...
> 

I am pretty sure the solaris pkgfmt is being replaced, in the not too
distant future.

See ya

Tim

(SunBlade 100, 768MB, A1000 diff-scsi (hardware raid), Expert3D Lite,
PGX64, SunPCI (win2000) card, Oracle Server 8i, LDAP Server, Apache, 5
instances of Zope, 2 using ZEO, ThoughtWeb Java based Knowledge Server,
running simultaneous KDE/Gnome/CDE Control panels, with KDE window
manager on one screen, and dtwm (CDE window manager) on the other ;-) 


> Sean
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tim Hoffman [mailto:timhoffman@cams.wa.gov.au]
> Sent: Tuesday, August 20, 2002 7:09 PM
> To: sean.upton@uniontrib.com
> Cc: myzope@gmx.net; zope@zope.org
> Subject: Re: CPU Affinity, was RE: [Zope] Linux vs. UNIX vs. BSD
> 
> 
> Thats what Solaris is for ;-) Processor affinity, processor sets, fair
> share scheduler etc.... 
> 
> Rgds
> 
> Tim
> 
> On Wed, 2002-08-21 at 07:51, sean.upton@uniontrib.com wrote:
> > This sounds better (and I think this is more advanced that the stuff
> RedHat
> > is doing, using Ingo Molnar's work in the O2 scheduler), because it is
> (and
> > should be) in this case simply a sysadmin task to make sure your Zope
> > instances (and all the processes tied to a particular instance) is bound
> to
> > the same CPU.
> > 
> > This would also be nice in the case of being able to use a single SMP box
> to
> > run a ZEO cluster within using UNIX sockets for communication, and binding
> > your ZEO clients (and the ZSS) to respective processors.
> > 
> > Sean
> > 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Oliver Bleutgen [mailto:myzope@gmx.net]
> > Sent: Tuesday, August 20, 2002 3:01 PM
> > To: sean.upton@uniontrib.com
> > Cc: zope@zope.org
> > Subject: Re: [Zope] Linux vs. UNIX vs. BSD
> > 
> > 
> > sean.upton@uniontrib.com wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > > Though we haven't used it yet, as I understand it, CPU affinity is
> > important
> > > to Python performance on SMP machines.   I expect that we will write or
> > find
> > > a simple user-space utility utilizing the new system calls to bind a
> group
> > > of processes to a single CPU.  I think, in theory, this will allow us to
> > > successfully run two Zope instances on an inexpensive 2CPU machine, each
> > > instance bound to a respective CPU.
> > > 
> > Heh, since I was looking at the page today, if you're talking about Robert
> > Loves 
> > 
> > work, you can find it here:
> > http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/rml/cpu-affinity/
> > 
> > Very nice, since they have a proc-interface, so all you need is echo.
> > 
> > I haven't tested it, but it sounds nice.
> > 
> > cheers,
> > oliver
> > 
> > 
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