OK, so now we have Linux running on everything...

Posted Jun 25, 2005 23:18 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: OK, so now we have Linux running on everything... by jwb
Parent article: Linux and the Top500

There's lots of fundamental areas where Win32 is superior to Linux. For one, reading and writing to filesystems. I know Windows isn't widely known to be an I/O monster, but it actually is. You can read or write to NTFS at about 3.5GB/s with a sufficiently large computer. Linux ext3 tops out at about 400MB/s read or write on today's fastest machines. XFS doesn't seem to have a read limit, but writes don't exceed 500MB/s for some reason.

This is only proves what I've known for a very long time: lots and lots of special-purpose cases. Bad for maintainance, bad for real tasks, great for benchmarks.

Don't forget that Microsoft has a lot of top-tier research talent and many of their fundamental operating system components, including their kernel and their filesystem, are very sound.

Sorry, but I've actually worked with "their kernel" and "their filesystem". It's a mess: few quite good ideas and huge amount of junk everywhere.

It takes a certain ignorance to come out and claim that Linux is superior in every conceivable application.

Not really. It only takes common sense. If stuff is needed often enough - it will work just fine. In stock kernel or in some addon. Someone will actully come and fix it. If stuff is not needed in real life - noone will bother. With Windows you have some things deemed important by "big bosses" where Windows is "much better" - and which are mostly irrelevant. How many systems with hardware actually capable of delivering more then 500MB/sec is out there ? How many users actually need such throughput ?