[TUHS] MacOS X is Unix (tm)

[Larry McVoy]

On Sun, Jan 01, 2017 at 12:28:50PM -0800, Kurt H Maier wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 01, 2017 at 11:33:45AM -0800, David wrote:
> > Linux is to diversified at this point to make it to the desktop any time soon.
> 
> I haven't had a job that didn't provide a Linux workstation since the
> early 2000s.  Linux has made it to the desktop already, regardless of what
> goes on in discount electronics stores.  It's not particularly good at
> the desktop, but then, it's not particularly good at anything else,
> either.  

I'd like to know where you can get a better performing OS.  The file systems
scream when compared to Windows or MacOS, they know about SSDs and do the
right thing.  The processes are light weight, I regularly do "make -j"
which on my machines just spawns as many processs as needed.

$ time make -j
real    0m17.336s
user    1m7.652s
sys     0m5.116s

$ time make -j12	# this is a 6 cpu/hyperthreaded to 12
real    0m16.473s
user    1m5.856s
sys     0m4.736s

So if I size it to the number of CPUs it is slightly faster.  On the other
hand, when I tell it just spawn as many as it wants it peaks at about 267
processes running in parallel.

Solaris, AIX, IRIX, HP-UX, MacOS would all thrash like crazy under that 
load, their context switch times are crappy.

Source: author of LMbench which has been measuring this stuff since the
mid 1990s.