That Linux is replacing its scheduler, threading facilities, VM, Filesystem of Choice, etc. several times per branch, often at a cost to module compatibility, is a pretty clear reason to use it as a counter-example of kernel development. I don't even suppose Linux is a competitor - DragonFly is for clustering and Linux is completely broken there, and Linux is for 'everything' (jack of all trades) and short of a huge influx of developer and user resources DragonFly will never, ever catch up in that field, and if it does, it'd probably hurt the goals of the project anyway.
Not to say a better scheduler isn't welcome, but it should be positive towards the goals of DragonFly, not to emulate the behavior of Linux, bugs-n-all. For instance, that documentation mentions that the CPU load balancer willingly under-utilizes CPU caches, which is a great way to kill throughput. Matt has gone to great lengths to educate his mailing list and documentation readers why it's worth saving every cycle and avoiding every cache miss, so deliberately scheduling in the opposite way is probably not a scheduler DragonFly wants to end up with. --- Dmitri Nikulin Centre for Synchrotron Science Monash University Victoria 3800, Australia email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
