Re: Two NetBSDs: from Desktop NetBSD needs your help

[Mindaugas Rasiukevicius <rmind%netbsd.org@localhost>]

Miles Nordin <carton%Ivy.NET@localhost> wrote:
>  * fancy realtime scheduling.  well, nobody _really_ has this.  but is
>    NetBSD's kernel as fine-grained preemptable as Linux's at this
>    point?  Are the fancytimers finally working?  (I'm having some
>    problems with them on Linux I think.)  How about dividing
>    interrupts among CPU's in an SMP system, or partitioning certain
>    jobs vertically with CPU affinity to avoid lock contention like
>    Solaris does in several spots?  Linux is certanly well-flogged in
>    that department, and I'm not sure we've made any progress while
>    the other tent has.

Here NetBSD (since 5.0) is no worse than competitors.

- Apart from the drivers and network stack, kernel is essentially fine-grain
  locked (including rewritten scheduler, et al), many subsystems are lockless.

- Kernel preemption and POSIX real time extensions are supported.

- CPU affinity and processor sets are supported.

These are just few amongst many, many major improvements and/or features.

Performance on SMP systems and very low response times for real time
applications - these are the areas where NetBSD is really very good.

There will be more information about this - stay tuned. :)

> We're missing a lot of expert-user ``fancy'' things.  A lot of that
> list is probably fixed already since I've been a dropout for the whole
> 4.0 years, and haven't tried 5.0 yet.

It is true that in some places we need to catch-up. However, in the last three
years, there was a massive development of "expert-user fancy things" and more
is under-way for NetBSD -current, including most of the areas you have listed.

Hence, though marathon continues, today's NetBSD is a very modern system. :)

-- 
Best regards,
Mindaugas