A French user has discovered that ZFS is now 'officially' supported in Leopard [French], while testing the latest build of Apple's upcoming operating system. Indeed it is now possible to create disk images or partitions formated in ZFS (screen capture included). However, it seems that it is not possible yet to install the OS on a ZFS partition.
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Member since:2006-10-12
Encoding HDTV is a CPU-intensive process with a limited number of potential bottlenecks: simply pointing the finger at ‘the kernel’ isn't in the slightest bit useful, all told.
Realistically, there are only three real places that something like that could suffer: an I/O bottleneck (Linux could be more efficient at buffering than OS X), a memory-management issue (was XNU swapping when Linux wasn't, for example?), or a scheduling problem coupled with the two previous: for example, was there a resource over-allocation applied to the encoding process which makes task switches slower than they should be (i.e., causing a slow-down in both overall encoding performance and interactivity)?
What you really should be doing is profiling the encoder on both platforms to find out what's slowing it down: with a process that actually uses the kernel as infrequently is this, it wouldn't be particularly difficult to do and perform a real comparison.
Member since:
2006-12-16
If you decide to go ahead, drop me an e-mail. I've seriously thought about writing something like that myself.
Being a Linux guy myself, last September I bought a MacBookPro. I was on a hiatus using OSX for nearly two months non-stop. I thoroughly understand what you say about its kernel. The interface is very flashy and all, but seriously, its kernel is far worse than an unoptimized... I don't know what to compare it to.
Once I an on Linux (2.6 + CK) full time again, I feel I have unleashed the real power this machine has.
Tell me about leaving a lengthy CPU bound process like encoding an HDTV video with x264. You get a barely usable system on OSX, even nicing it +19. On Linux, I can keep doing that not only way faster than it was on OSX, but interactivity doesn't suffer at all.
I'd need to compile myself mplayer on OSX, tweaking it the way I do on Gentoo, to do a fair comparison. But still, the difference is awesome.
My 2˘.