[geeks] And The Linux Weenies Wonder Why They Aren't Mainstream...`

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Wed, 1 Mar 2006, Doug McLaren wrote:

> | OS X is OpenStep 7 with some FreeBSD userland utilities and man
> | pages.  It's not built off FreeBSD any more than FreeBSD is built
> | off GNU/Hurd.
>
> Sorry, I forgot to mention the Mach 3 kernel.  Also open source.

What does that have to do with anything?  I don't care if giant fuscia
bats from the far side of Mars clawed OS X's source code into the side
of a school bus and licensed it to Apple via human sacrifice.  The point
is the thing works.  I have no beef with software that is or isn't under
any particular licnese.

I started this whole thread because some moron gave an interview on the
premise that people don't use Linux because they're too stupid to know
that Linux works just great for them, and they should just wake up and
recognize that.  The fact is that just isn't so for a great number of
computing tasks.

>> From http://www.apple.com/macosx/overview/advancedtechnology.html --
>
>   Beneath the easy-to-use interface and rich graphics of Mac OS X lies
>   Darwin, an open source, UNIX-based foundation built on such
>   technologies as mach and FreeBSD.'

That's really just marketspeak.  There are FreeBSD userland utilities
and man pages in OS X, but the kernel is still Mach.

> Call it what you will, but even MacOS is built on open source software

So?

> | My experience has been that OpenOffice and the recent releases of the
> | RPM-based Linux distributions miss that point entirely.
>
> Now you've gotten rpm into this rant?  What does rpm have to do with
> this?

I've not gotten RPM into this rant.  Pick an RPM-based distribution
(Fedora, RHEL, Mandrake) and witness what a bloated pile of junk it is.
Take two identical PCs (I did this at home with a pair of Dell Precision
410 systems); load FreeBSD (or OpenBSD) on one, and load RHEL or Fedora
on the other.  Even after you load all the third-party software you need
from ports, the BSD box will still be faster and have a lighter disk
footprint than the Linux box.  Where the BSDs tend to concentrate on
making stuff work well, the RPM-based Linux distributions tend to
concentrate on making stuff look flashy.

Yes, there's Linuxfromscratch, Slackware, and any other numer of sane,
trimmed-down distributions, which is specifically why I mentioned the
RPM-based distributions.  Because, had I just said "Linux", I'd be told
that Mozilla isn't part of the kernel and that Coyote Linux couldn't
possibly be called bloated.

>
> | 69473 jp    5  20    0    99M 71484K kserel   0:04  0.00% soffice.bin
> |
> | That's OpenOffice with one empty document open.
>
> And now we're ranting about memory usage specifics.  This is your
> FreeBSD box, right?

Yes.

> If you haven't seen it, you might want to take a look at this --
>
>   http://virtualthreads.blogspot.com/2006/02/understanding-memory-usage-on-linux.html

Yes, I'm aware ps doesn't tell the whole story.  But you don't need it
to the whole story down to the kilobyte when the numbers are different.
Lots of the added memory in OpenOffice (and, indeed, who knows how many
X applications) comes from the necessity of reinventing the wheel on X:
OpenOffice provides its own widget kit, Office for Macintosh uses the
Apple widget kit.  That's quite a lot of memory that -will- be shared on
the Mac, but not on the FreeBSD box.

> And this article doesn't even begin to talk about mmap()'d blocks of
> I/O memory.  For example, my X server isn't really using 350 MB of
> memory like ps reports.  I think the true figure is closer to 50 MB.

Because, certainly, OpenOffice needs write access to the IO address
space.  That way it can just snag documents off the PCI bus instead of
them having to go through th FS layer.  Entirely unapplicable.

>  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
> 3576 dmclaren  15   0 37552  18m  13m S  0.7  1.8   0:04.61 abiword
>
> (And now I've thrown yet a third OS into the already muddled
> memory-usage melee.  To be a bit more fair, here's OpenOffice 2.0
> writer on my system with nothing loaded but an empty document --
>
>  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
> 3802 dmclaren  15   0  153m  48m  33m S  2.3  4.8   0:06.10 swriter.bin
>
> ... though it's still not clear what figure I should use to say
> `oowriter is using THIS much memory.'

Comparing RES columns is probably the fairest of the lot.  Or RES-SHR.

> Also note that `nothing open' doesn't mean much unless it also means
> `nothing has been opened since the process was started.'

Which is exactly what I meant.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke    )   "Pain and misery always hit the spot,
Elgin, TX           (     knowing you can't lose what you haven't got."
USA                  )                         --Depeche Mode, "Lilian"