Its not 'multi tasking' anymore? LONG

[Joseph E. Sacco, Ph.D.]

Agreed... With ever bigger, faster, stronger, ..., computers, engineers
don't need to be as careful as they used to be. When in doubt, throw
more hardware at the problem.

Presently,  YDL-4 runs Gnome-2.6, and DBUS,  but not HAL. I spent some
iterations last month with David Zeuthen, the maintainer of HAL, to get
HAL working under YDL-4. The GNOME folks require it for 2.8.2.1, which
is the current stable version

It would be an interesting exercise to determine the impact of these
agents on things like disk I/O and task switching. When I get some free
cycles I will think about some metrics. Happiness could be a set of
monitoring and tuning tools for YDL like those developed by Adrian
Cockcroft and Richard Pettit for SPARC. There are linux ports of sar and
the various "stats", io, vm, mp. Still, not quite in the same class.


-Joseph
-------------------------------------------


On Sun, 2005-02-13 at 18:28, Cian Duffy wrote:
> Theres another issue here - Bloat.
> 
> I never used YDL3 because I never had recent PPC hardware until a few
> months ago - my Apple hardware line stopped abruptly before the G3. So
> I dunno what it had in it
> 
> But YDL4 has Kudzu, and due to having GNOME available, presumably has
> Hal and DBUS. It has to have some kind of hotplug manager for USB
> devices and the like. All of these start to add serious overhead to
> the system. KDE has something which scans for inserted CD's, which it
> might not have had in YDL3. Something constantly scanning for new
> disks can seriously slow down disk I/O.
> 
> Unfortunately, bloat, extra layers between the user and the hardware,
> etc are what we pay for for usability, particularly on a UNIX system.
> Many of us here could live with mounting CD's manually and modprobing
> in drivers for newly inserted hardware, but new users cannot,
> particularly not the stereotypical MacOS user (the mice have one
> button for a reason).
> 
> Progress. Its a bitch.
> 
> Cian
> 
> 

-- 
joseph_sacco[at]comcast[dot]net