On Feb 9, 3:57 am, Roy Schestowitz <newsgro...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Comparing Linux and Minix
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | The UnixBench results (raw results: Minix, Linux) paint a rather
> | different picture. These results are summarized in the plot to the
> | left; the upper bar for each test represents Linux. The measured
> | system call overhead for Minix is a full ten times higher than
> | the value for Linux. The file copy tests ran between two and ten
> | times faster on Linux. Pipe throughput differed by a factor of
> | seven; Minix was 140 times slower at process creation. The
> | difference in shell script execution performance, however, was
> | 1.4 - in Minix's favor. One assumes that the rather simple shell
> | provided by Minix is, at least, faster than bash.
> `----
>
This illustrates the difficulty with where to draw the line on what is
'core' kernel stuff. Minix draws it very tight and hence seems to
have intrinsic performance issues, Linux draws it at traditional OV v
applications boundary whereas Windows allows core applications (eg IE,
Office etc) to intrude into OS territory. The Windows approach
possibly (perhaps only theoretically) gives improved performance at
the expense of security.
An aspect of Linus's success is selecting the most practical
compromise.
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