Yesterday, Karl J. Runge gleaned this insight:
> > Linux has the most comprehensive documentation of any operating system
> > available, commercial or free. The documentation is available on-line, and
> > with each Linux distribution.
>
> So you are including the web-lookup aspect when you say Linux has most
> comprehensive documentation? Just curious, would you make the same
> statement for the docs that ship with the OSes, comparing Linux against
> the (latest versions of!) non-Linux OSes?
Absolutely. In addition to all the manpages, virtually all decent distros
come with the latest versions of the FAQs and HOWTOs available at
Linuxdoc.org on the CD and/or installed in /usr/doc. I've seen the
documentation that Sun ships, and it sucks. Until at least Solaris 2.6
their manpages were woefully incomplete.
> Often (not always) the Linux docs are a bit shabby since documentation
> tends to not be the most exciting part of OSS. I can't really say which
> is better overall (shipped-with docs for Linux or for non-Linux) since
> the features are far from 1-to-1, but Linux docs certainly can be
> dissappointing at times...
When have you been disappointed? I'll admit that Linux documentation
tends to be a bit on the terse side, but I find that refreshing, as I
don't have to wade through 50 pages of gibberish to find what I'm looking
for. The HOWTOs for example are generally written to be clear, consise,
step-by-step procedures for how to do some specific task. No other OS has
such a thing that I know of, but they all should...
> Linux works well on these SMP boxes for userland apps, but when it
> comes to measuring "multi-cpu scalability" the benchmark seems to be
> multi-threading kernel activities (e.g. I/O) and not userland
> activities (e.g. rendering that just needs CPU). Your remark seems to
> be a bit sweeping here; I don't believe Linux scales well (in the
> kernel I/O sense) on >4 CPU boxes, right?
I can't speak to that, other than to say Linus, Alan, and co. know about
SMP scalability issues and are working on them. You may find that the
2.4 kernel will have much improved SMP support (and then again you may
not)...
--
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Derek D. Martin | Unix/Linux Geek
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