Re: Sysinst default root login shell

[Matthew Mondor <mm_lists%pulsar-zone.net@localhost>]

On Thu, 12 Apr 2012 23:04:33 +0200
Johnny Billquist <bqt%softjar.se@localhost> wrote:

> Funny you should say that, while a CVS checkout of all of the NetBSD 
> source tree have grown in time from about 20 minutes to about 5 hours on 
> a VAX-8650 as we move from NetBSD 2 to NetBSD 5. Did we really improve 
> performance, or did we only just get faster computers, while the code 
> itself got slower?

Faster hardware, but also software that adapts better to that hardware:

Most of the performance improvements I was refering to happened
between netbsd-4 and netbsd-5, when Andrew Doran worked full-time on
performance and SMP:
http://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/netbsd_5_0_an_overview

This included changing a number of operations that were previously
executing in O(n) time to now execute in O(1) time, making MP-safe some
critical sections, not using the big lock anymore for MP-safe sections,
scheduler and interrupt processing changes, a new 1:1 POSIX threading
system that can more easy scale with SMP, etc.
-- 
Matt