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Re: NT vs Linux
On Sun, 23 May 1999, Liran Zvibel wrote:
> > " Integratedfile cache for faster
> > access to commonly used files
> > Asynchronous I/O - Threads
> > can process other tasks while
> > waiting on I/O thus improving
> > performance and scalability"
> > - Performance issues are always arguable. The I/O and Threads
> > are just marketing words used to just to make WinNT look more
> > "New Technology".
> They are talking about a multithreaded filesystem, which is a thing you have
> to worry about in a micro kernel OS. Linux is a monolithic kernel, and thus
> does not need multithreaded FS! Just because it is monolithic it gets all the
> features without having to worry about it.
> Linux can have several threads working together and while one thread blocks
> for IO the rest can continue working.
this is certainly NOT what asynchronous I/O is. asynchronous I/O means
that your thread does NOT get blocked waiting for I/O. instead, it is
being notified when some I/O operation has been complete (either a write
operation, or a read - a seek or a block fetch operation). This could
employ usage of DMA, and during that time, your thread does not need to
be blocked. asynchronous I/O is supported on newer unix systems (such as
solaris 2.6 - functions aioread, aiowrite, aioread64, aiowrite64).
linux does not implmenet this yet.
> > "Integrated platform built around
> > ease of use
> > GUI-based tools
> > Wizards to simplify complicated
> > tasks
> > Scriptable administration for
> > automated local and remote
> > management"
> I don't know about the scriptable thingie. Any NT admin willing to talk about
> scripting in NT?
> I think that this GUI thingis one of the things that does not let NT have
> high benchmarks scores. While a Linux server does not have to run X and the
> graphical environment, NT has to waste CPU cycles updating the screen all the
> time.
according to O'rreily's "Essential windows NT system administration", and
their "windows NT user administration" (hope i got them right), you have a
few command-line utilities that allow you to do some automation of
administration on NT. these are not sufficient, however. windows NT has
some extra pack that can be gotten (purchased?), that contains several
more such command-line utilities, as well as perl for windows NT, which
has indings to quite many of the win32 APIs (including those used to
enumeration users, create, modify and delete users and groups, etc. etc.
etc.). Thus, you'd go get this pack and user perl in a _much_ easier way
then you'd do on unix (simply because unix lacks proper _standard_ APIs
for handling its vast configuration files. for example, there's API to
enumeate users, but no API to actually add new users, and this is one
simple exaple.
guy