On Sat, Sep 1, 2018 at 9:01 AM Larry McVoy <
lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
On Sat, Sep 01, 2018 at 12:43:52PM +0100, Steve Mynott wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Aug 2018 at 15:53, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> The BSDs have a less than optimal VM system. Having SunOS opened up
> > would at least let people see what they are missing. Maybe I have
> > rose colored glasses on but it was the only kernel that came into
> > focus for me and you could see the architecture from the code.
> > Everything else seems like a mess to me.
> >
>
> That may have been true in the late 80s and even early 90s but I'd have
> thought FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD would have useable VMs by now.
I wandered through the FreeBSD VM recently. Perhaps I'm just old and
tired but it looked pretty messy to me. Still Mach based and the
Mach VM system, which came about at about the same time as the SunOS
VM system, doesn't remotely compare. Sun had some exceptional
talent at the time, there was a reason I fought hard to join that
group, I wanted to work with people who were better than me.
It is still technically mach based, but it's fixed most of the scalability issues Mach had (and that MacOS still has).
There's much clutter in the VM, and there's areas that could stand to be rewritten, or to get at least a good cleaning.
The SunOS vm was far superior in its day, and likely is still cleaner than what's in FreeBSD. But it can't scale like FreeBSD's vm (or NetBSD's or even MacOS's) because it hasn't had the same care and feeding for the last 25 years. It's still single threaded and hasn't had the care and feeding to make it perform well in MP situations. Solbourne spent years hacking it to make it scale better, but even with 16 processors that was the high end for them, and they were barely 10x faster than a uniprocessor for many work loads due, in part, to vm contention limiting scalability. We had 2 8 CPU machines that could build our software ~20% faster (with netmake) than the 1 16 CPU machine the OS group had, for example... I recall many discussions with Dave Barak who did the fine-grained work on the 4.0 SunOS kernel complaining about how many of the clever tricks in different subsystems that worked great on UP were terrible for MP...
I don't doubt we'd be in an even better place today if we'd started with the SunOS vm system in 4.4BSD rather than mach. Don't get me wrong. And I'll not be the first in line to defend its elegance or clarity of design (in fact, it has many design issues that took a decade to recode to properly scale, and we're still not done). And lord knows even though I'm not close to the foremost expert in the vm, I could easily put together an hour or two talk on how all the areas of the VM that are holding us back. Yet even with all that, I think that the ugly, warty, co-evolved code we have in FreeBSD performs better than the SunOS vm code on any objective benchmark you could have.
Warner