Re: Memory Rusting Effect [re: Linux hostile to poverty]

Christer Weinigel (wingel@hog.t1.ctrl-c.liu.se)
20 Jul 1998 01:49:00 -0000

In article <199807192348.TAA04206@hilfy.ece.cmu.edu> allbery@kf8nh.apk.net wrote:
>Folks, increased functionality and/or increased performance almost always
>means increased memory footprint. There's no fix for that yet, as long as
>the kernel itself can't be swapped (and I don't think we want to deal with
>the *nasty* potential deadlocks inherent in swappable kernel memory!).
>
>The difference with respect to Windows is that there's hardly any additional
>functionality or performance to justify the bloat....

No additional functionality? Things I can come up with just off the
top of my head:

* much better SMP support
* much faster file operations (due to the dcache i guess)
* support for parallel port devices, IDE drives, tapes, whatever
* ipchains, faster firewalling
* more advanced routing, policy routing, multiple routing tables
* kernel NFSD
* better support for more architectures
* generic performance optimisations

But I suppose many of these things aren't something a casual user will
notice, except for the performance optimisations on big machines.

On the other hand, for small machines, maybe 2.0 with some
enhancements will be enough. It would be nice to be able to run 2.1
in 4MB, but TANSTAAFL, there is a reason why Paul Gortmaker based his
minimal linux system on kernel 1.0.

/Christer (tired and mostly babbling)

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