Methodology used

Methodology used

Posted Feb 6, 2007 15:40 UTC (Tue) by tjc (subscriber, #137)
In reply to: Methodology used by pjm
Parent article: Comparing Linux and Minix

I don't know whether MINIX 3 contains any significant performance improvements that could reasonably be applied to MINIX 2 as well, [snip]

As far as I know neither MINIX 2 or MINIX 3 contain anything at all in the way of perfomance enhancements. The simple algorithms are used for everything so that they are easy to understand.

... but at least the comparison is against a realistic monolithic kernel (presumably not using message passing).

MINIX 2 uses a microkernel - and message passing - as well. I'd have to dig out my MINIX 2 book to be sure, but IIRC MINIX 2 had most of the OS running as a single user-mode process, and the drivers in the kernel, whereas MINIX 3 has most of the OS and all the drivers (except the clock) partitioned into seperate user-mode processes. So MINIX 2 is quite slow, and MINIX 3 is a bit slower than that.

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