The performance of computer hardware typically increases monotonically with time. Even if the same could be said of software, the rate at which software performance improves is usually very slow compared to that of hardware. In fact, many might opine that there is plenty of software whose performance has deteriorated consistently with time. Moreover, it is rather difficult to establish an objective performance metric for software as complex as an operating system: a “faster OS” is a very subjective, context dependent phrase. Read the article at KernelThread.
Making An Operating System Faster
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Nicely done.
“GUI” and “OS” are more or less the same thing on Microsoft platforms.
Nice article.
It’s also interesting to see that Apple was very much concerned with perceived performance, which is most important for a single-user uniprocessor desktop machine.
Conclusion: OS performance may have a different meaning depending on usage.
One step I took to make my operating system faster was switching to linux.
http://primates.ximian.com/~rml/blog/
Thanks for posting that. I would have asked “what does linux do?”
Anyway I would like an improvement in #1 and #10. I think they are most important for end-users.
#1 is already effectively done by rml
#10 is something linux doesnt do right always. there are three different implementations but whats needed is a single consolidated implementation that works all the time. the current situation is pretty much messed up.
Good article. I realy like that site, they have alot of good stuff.
Is #1 included by any or all distro’s yet?
“Is #1 included by any or all distro’s yet?”
the preload and project utopia including hal and stuff is not very much bleeding edge. you can yum/redcarpet repos which contain these rpms for both novell and redhat linux including srpms and tar for other distros
i use them
It’s interesting to notice that the performance difference can be great even between linux distros. For example, each debian installation I’ve seen takes several minutes to boot, while some newer distributions (Arch Linux comes to mind, although it’s some time since I last used it) are much faster.
Then there are the source based distros where you can optimize software for your own architecture. Very nice (especially when you can use things like combreloc linker options which makes the load time of binaries faster).
Some X desktop environments take half a minute to boot up.
Then again, xfce4 is, what, 5 seconds. And fvwm probably even faster.
What do you think is the fastest (perceivedly or measuredly) of the freely available operating systems – Linux distributions and BSDs?
I love my BeOS/Zeta… is really quickly than others OS…
😛
Is Linux really faster than OSX?
For me, percieved performance is the most important performance, since I”m a desktop-user in genenral, a coder as well, but am not upset by slightly longer or shorter compile times for big projects.
For me the following times are important:
Boot time
Shutdodwn time
Sleep time
Wake time
The amount of time it takes from when I select a GUI element to the time it graphically responds
The amount of time from when the GUI element graphically responds to the time the display is updated with the new,
relevent information (this will be app-dependant, such as loading web pages, not OS dependant, but everything else is OS dependant)
And smoothness:
The smoothness of the mouse pointer under load
Continuity in media playback under load (partially app-dependant, partially OS dependant)
The smoothness of two, equally prioritized CPU bound tasks that hit the display (BeOS rocks in this one, Linux is awful (on purpose, choosing faster total execution), Mac OS X is somewhere in between)
I think these should be the times to optimize for user-perception.
Heh. It’s pretty much impossible to accurately say one way or another as every one of them are moving targets, constantly improving. If one gets ahead, it rarely stays there for very long.
Personally, I’ve found FreeBSD to be the best performing in general, with DragonFly being a close second (there are still some irritating moments where apps will pause briefly when something intensive is going on in the background in DF — silly pre-beta OSs
.
Like they say, YMMV.
Not exactly sure why the guy framed it in a MacOS X context, seeing as how all the major OS’s do the same stuff, but informative nonetheless.
I guess I now know what FC2 is talking about when it starts “early_readahead”.
-Erwos
Maybe it was just easier to explain in the MacOSX context
Seeing as how Apple is reaping huge profit from OS X, it’s nice to see them giving some of these kernel-based performance enhancements back to the BSD folks who wrote the kernel.
Although this is allowed with the BSD license, it’s certainly not the friendliest way to do business.
Speaking of fast Operating Systems.
In thing is clear MorphOS is probably
the fastest Operating System of them all!
I’m always shocked when I leave my beloved Pegasos
and work with other Windows, Linux, or MacOS boxes.
If you want to see how fast operating system
a operating system can be,
then you should have a look at a Pegasos.
Cheers
Gunnar
Yepp, so did I, then I moved on to BeOS and found it to be thrice as fast as Linux… a good move indeed.
If I remember correctly, Apple did not use the BSD kernel in creating Darwin. Check out some Darwin history, and you’ll find that Apple chose version 3 of the Mach microkernel as the basis for Darwin. Incidentally, Mach was developed by students at MIT, and its license–at least its version 3 license–allows this type of use. BSD, however, is running a monolithic kernel. Apple combined Mach microkernel technology with a BSD layer, essentially providing a very familiar BSD-like interface to the kernel… Originally many of the standard BSD utilities had a very NetBSD flare to them, but they are being migrated over to FreeBSD 5.x versions of the same utilities. This is most likely due to the participation of Jordan Hubard, et al.
QUOTE: it’s certainly not the friendliest way to do business.
I’m not sure why you would claim this: Apple is spending money to improve open source software, selling it to its customers, yet still providing critical performance improving feedback to the OSS developer community. I would have to respectfully disagree with your last comment, but to each his/her own…
-Karrick
If I remember correctly, Apple did not use the BSD kernel in creating Darwin.
Followed by:
Apple combined Mach microkernel technology with a BSD layer, essentially providing a very familiar BSD-like interface to the kernel.
What a wonderfully contradictory post!
Seriously though, Apple used both Mach and BSD in their kernel, and both provide essential functionality to Mac OS X.