Re: Preparations for ZD's upcoming Apache/Linux benchmark

Jeff Garzik (jgarzik@pobox.com)
Tue, 8 Jun 1999 02:46:02 -0400 (EDT)


Followup to: <199906080523.PAA00875@vindaloo.atnf.CSIRO.AU>
By author: Richard Gooch <rgooch@atnf.csiro.au>
In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel

> Linus Torvalds writes:
> > And I'm very interested in people doing kernel modules for static
> > content serving with fall-backs to Apache etc. That is, to a large
> > degree, what NT seems to be doing, with IIS-only magic system calls
> > etc. And we can do it so much more cleanly.

> Does that mean you'd accept a patch which did this?

> What about the arguments that this would be increased kernel bloat/do
> it in user space, etc?

There are definitely gains to having static serving and similar things
in kernel space... but this sort of thing should really be a
separately-distributed kernel module. khttpd could definitely be useful
on 2.0, 2.2, and 2.3 kernels. And the development pace and stability
of khttpd and the kernel might not necessarily intersect often.

Tangent to this, it would be cool to move some drivers to a "driver pack",
basically a separate release tarball that closely tracks kernel releases.

It seems to me that you get better results sometimes by mixing and
matching specific driver versions direct from its maintainer, as opposed
to mixing and matching kernel releases themselves to get a good, stable
combination. Plus, stable, well-tested versions of some drivers sometimes
appear faster than the stable versions of the kernel itself.

Jeff

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