Subject: Re: LinuxPPC+MOL versus MacOS X Public Beta
From: Timothy A. Seufert (tas@mindspring.com)
Date: Fri Sep 29 2000 - 01:39:21 MDT
At 8:20 AM -0400 9/28/00, johnathan spectre wrote:
>Why does it take at least 5 minutes for Classic to boot up for me
>when MOL starts up in under a minute?
I haven't timed it precisely, but it takes less than 30 seconds to
start Classic on my computer (B&W G3 500 MHz w/ 192MB).
I've heard of others having terrible performance with Classic, and
fixing it by creating a fresh virgin OS 9 install specifically for
Classic.
>I can't control how much RAM Classic
>gets, but I can control that and a lot of other things about MOL.
That's one of the things Classic is doing better than MOL, actually,
due to Apple's ability to change OS 9's behavior. OS 9 lives in
about a gigabyte's worth of virtual address space, and it cooperates
with OS X VM by not touching any of that space until it's allocated.
Therefore OS X doesn't have to allocate any real memory or swap space
until it's used, and therefore you don't have to worry about how much
memory to allocate to Classic: it uses exactly as much as it needs
for the task at hand.
>Finally, LinuxPPC/MOL supports my Airport! :-)
Has nothing to do with Classic, of course.
>How is Classic going "far beyond" MOL? What else is left to add?
Obviously, as far as you're concerned, nothing. But it's rather
self-centered to assume that your needs are everybody's. A lot of
Apple's userbase probably wouldn't accept a MOL-like environment.
>Both run
>"Classic" MacOS applications, both support networking. Pretty much all
>either has to do is support various devices, firewire, usb, etc. I'm sure
>Samuel is working on this just as much as Apple is.
I'm sure that he's not; the timing of releases over the course of the
last year or so makes me suspect he's a university student, working
on MOL mainly when he's on break. :) Which, BTW, is all the more
reason to be impressed.
>You'd think with Apple's
>"more resources" they could give us something better than they already have.
You evidently missed the part where I mentioned that they were at the
point of doing more or less everything MOL does now at least a year
ago, but better. It was fullscreen only, no windowed mode, but it
had the VM memory allocation scheme, was easier to set up, so on and
so forth.
Apple pretty clearly chose to strive for a much bigger feature set
instead of polishing that version of Classic to a mirror finish and
shipping it.
>As I said different people have different opinions. Apple is trying to blur
>the lines between 9/X so they can maintain the wide program base of 9 while
>developers catch-up (or abandon) X. I don't care much for the job they've
>done so far.
That's fine, but you shouldn't confuse teething problems with utter
lack of merit. Early versions of MOL were very difficult to get
running and tended to crash Linux hard (yes, MOL could and did do
that; after all, it patches the kernel). But when I looked at it in
those days I didn't seen a hopeless mess, I saw a diamond in the
rough.
Tim Seufert
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