Microkernel Design Info

[srg]

Still it's not the hardware to blame but the OS design.

I have a Win2k running on a 1,2 GHz Athlon, enjoying 256 MByte RAM and residing on a U2W SCSI hard drive. There's hardly any swapping, ever, since all the stuff I use fits comfortably in there.

Still, my WinCE (206 MHz StrongARM and 32 MByte RAM) boots / starts applications faster, and my late Amiga (50 MHz 68060 with 32 MByte RAM) did beat the living daylight out of my Win2k tower in just about everything but MP3 encoding and GCC compilation times.

The better the hardware, the less return-on-MHz you get, because everybody - mainboard designer, OS designer, app designer - thinks he's entitled to enjoy the added hardware capabilities. Some of 'em even think they're doing the user a favour, because now everything is animated and automagically guessing your every whim...

I believe that's a seriously flawed thought. I am the user. I payed for that hardware, and I am the only one to enjoy its benefits - not in terms of eye candy, but snappy response, short compilation / encoding times, and flawless multimedia.

But eye candy sells, as Microsoft and SuSE know all too well.

Things can be easy to use but not have too much eye candy, I agree.

Still, a PDA doesn't have something with a spinning disk and glacial seek time.

Agree with the Amiga, in theory with the right software I could basically do everything (appart from Midtown Madness 2) that I do with my PC witmy old Amiga (50MHz 68030 10MB RAM 250MB hard drive).

But don't forget that 68K code is more compact than x86.

srg

P.S. My PC boots in the same time as my old amiga did.

[Curufir]

Well we're wandering off-topic, but the subject matter is interesting enough to pursue .

My personal gripe is the level of indirection currently being used. What I mean is if I try to put a widget on screen with something like QT the path between my code requesting a widget and the widget actually being drawn is very long (I haven't actually run a trace to find out).

I'm not saying that's the only thing slowing down modern systems, but I'd hazard a guess that execution path lengths have increased drastically over the past decade.

[Solar]

But don't forget that 68K code is more compact than x86.

Not as much as die-hard Amiga evangelists keep telling you. And then, your Amiga runs 60ns PS/2 RAM at best, has nothing better than a SCSI-2 disk interface...

Well, one thing that did speed up the Amiga was the total ignorance of memory protection. Physical addresses only, no MMU, to page tables, no TLB flushes...

[srg]

But don't forget that 68K code is more compact than x86.

Not as much as die-hard Amiga evangelists keep telling you. And then, your Amiga runs 60ns PS/2 RAM at best, has nothing better than a SCSI-2 disk interface...

Well, one thing that did speed up the Amiga was the total ignorance of memory protection. Physical addresses only, no MMU, to page tables, no TLB flushes...

My Amiga 1200's expansion card had a 60ns SIMM. Oh and the A1200 had an IDE disk controller (my hard disk was 2.5" IDE).

srg

[Colonel Kernel]

I'm not saying that's the only thing slowing down modern systems, but I'd hazard a guess that execution path lengths have increased drastically over the past decade.

That's very true, and can probably be blamed almost exclusively on the need for backwards compatibility. Windows does some incredibly evil things for the sake of compatibility, some of which are mentioned here.