[Gllug] Random freezes

[Nix]

On Fri, 28 Jan 2005, Christian Smith spake:
> With sun4c, NetBSD handles the strange SPARC MMU much better than Linux
> ever could

That's a risky statement.

>            due to the fundamental weakness of Linux MM architecture.

Fundamental weakness? It's grown from an i386-specific system into
something that can now handle ~15 wildly disparate architectures (I
think that count's right, although some of them have iffy libc support
or wobbly maintenance), NUMA and shared-cache and
partially-shared-cache, caches software-maintained and not, you name it.

In fact, substantial revisions were made specifically to support SPARC.

(Note that while several different MMUs are used on SPARC-class boxes,
the UltraSPARC MMUs are recognisably related to (some of) the SPARC
ones, and many of the same weird features are still needed (IIRC, the
biggest being software-invalidated caches and the lovely instructions
that let you look at address spaces `as if' you were running in some
other protection domain; but it's several years since I looked at this
last...)


So what's NetBSD got that Linux hasn't in this area? Where's Linux's MM
`fundamentally weak'? (And which MM do you mean? 2.0, 2.2, 2.4 <2.4.10,
2.4.x >2.4.10, and 2.6 are really quite different from each other in
a number of fundamental ways.)

-- 
`Blish is clearly in love with language. Unfortunately,
 language dislikes him intensely.' --- Russ Allbery
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