[Am-info] Gateway Official Hits Microsoft Licensing In Testimony

[Eric M. Hopper]

On Tue, 2002-03-26 at 15:37, Mike Stephen wrote:
> For something like the WPS to run on Linux would require a new file
> system to be adopted and standardised on .  This will not happen in
> the Linux world.  It (A file system that allows Metadata (Extended
> Attributes)).  There are filesystems available that allow this, but
> the Linux world will never make it a standard.  Because of this no
> programmers will take advantage of it, therefore a WPS type
> environment will never happen.

If I'm not mistaken, reiserfs allows arbitrary meta-data to be stored in
the filesystem.  reiserfs is far from standard, but it's pretty widely
available.

Also, you can always do what most programs that store meta-data do, make
a .<something> directory and store the meta-data in that.

> The Linux kernal still has a huge lacl of "fluid" multitasking.  Its
> multitasking is on a par with windows XP.  Basically, Linus sucks as
> far as multitasking...  Those two points are the major flawed in
> Linux, when comparing to Warp. Besides if we complain about windows
> lack of innovation, how can anyone possibly say that Linux dos not
> have that same lack?

Linux certainly does lack innovation in some areas.  Most notably, it
makes it very hard to write certain kinds of ultra-high performance
mass-data movement programs because it doesn't do a good job of turning
operating system events into user events.  It doesn't have BSD's
excellent kernel queue, nor Windows much more kludgey IO completion
ports.  It has SIGIO, which is slower and not widely implemented by
device drivers, and it has select, which is much slower.

As far as 'fluid' multitasking, I have no idea what you mean.  Linux's
context switch times are amazingly low.  Lower than any other OS I know
of.  Its process context switch times are lower than NTs thread context
switch times.  Its main problem is scheduler latency (which is a minor
problem), and that's being fixed as we speak.

None of the things you mention are a big barrier to porting any OS/2
application to Linux, or any other OS for that matter.

Have fun (if at all possible),
-- 
"It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.
It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."  --- Thomas Jefferson
"Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company."  -- Mark Twain
-- Eric Hopper (hopper@omnifarious.org  http://www.omnifarious.org/~hopper) --