DragonFlyBSD 6.0 Performance Is Looking Great - Initial Benchmarks

[waxhead]

AmigaOS definitely does use a slab allocator, but that was added in 2006 with the 4.0 update. The memory allocator DragonflyBSD uses is ultimately based upon what it had when it split from FreeBSD in 2003, which is a reimplementation of Sun's slab allocator.

Yeah I am aware that a full blown SLAB allocator was added in AmigaOS4, I am probably wrong then, but I was under the impression that even the classic Amiga operating system did use some of the principles of SLAB allocation. Sadly I don't know how the classic allocator works in detail so I would not know for sure.

[Space Heater]

It might be , but still the Amiga (pre-AmigaOS4) does allocate memory in chunks. Not sure how it keeps track of them, but I *think* that a few of the SLAB allocation principles are used. I may of course be totally wrong about that.

AmigaOS definitely does use a slab allocator, but that was added in 2006 with the 4.0 update. The memory allocator DragonflyBSD uses is ultimately based upon what it had when it split from FreeBSD in 2003, which is a reimplementation of Sun's slab allocator.

[waxhead]

The Slab allocator was invented by Jeff Bonwick while at Sun Microsystems and was originally used in Solaris, it's unrelated to Amiga.

It might be , but still the Amiga (pre-AmigaOS4) does allocate memory in chunks. Not sure how it keeps track of them, but I *think* that a few of the SLAB allocation principles are used. I may of course be totally wrong about that.

http://amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD_2.1/Includes_and_Autodocs_2._guide/node0332.html

https://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/Exec_Memory_Allocation#Slab_allocation

[Space Heater]

Sure thing... unless I am mistaking the SLAB memory allocator that was backported from DragonflyBSD to FreeBSD was based uppon the concepts of the Amiga.

The Slab allocator was invented by Jeff Bonwick while at Sun Microsystems and was originally used in Solaris, it's unrelated to Amiga.

[danmcgrew]

waxhead
Nice response, thx!

I totally agree: nice response, waxhead .

And, to make my original comment perfectly clear: I certainly did not mean to imply that your comment (#2) was the reason the discussion tended to go "off the rails"; nothing could be further from what I intended. That was a perfectly legitimate, well-thought-out comment, obviously based upon very impressive and hard-won experience.
Many thanks for your contributions.

[Steffo]

waxhead
Nice response, thx!

[waxhead]

It never ceases to amaze me that only one comment (and #2, in the queue)...ONE!...can completely derail (up to sixteen comments, currently) what should have been a commentary on a very topical and extremely interesting subject, and one which Michael Larabel offered with the loftiest of intentions: education and enlightenment regarding DragonFly BSD ("...Yes, SailfishOS is irrelevant. I don't know a single person, which [sic] uses it..." Need any further examples?).

It'll be interesting to see how the Raspberry Pi fanbois contingent gets in their two cents' worth.

Derailed... maybe, but still not that far off the track. There are interesting discussions coming out of this and a discussion about usage may even be relevant for DragonflyBSD. Just perhaps some of the comments above (such as Vistatus' comment) will inspire someone to try DragonflyBSD for the first time. Not exactly on spot on for the topic, but really not that off topic either. Perhaps they will be more interested in performance numbers later.

Anyway ... I am off to download the latest DragonflyBSD and try it out.

[waxhead]

Could you elaborate this statement?

Sure thing... unless I am mistaking the SLAB memory allocator that was backported from DragonflyBSD to FreeBSD was based uppon the concepts of the Amiga. And as other have said the IPC in kernel as well as some caching mechanisms inspired either by the Amiga OS itself or some program that was run on Amiga.

Other than that Mathew Dillon wrote the DICE C compiler for the Amiga which means that he (probably) has some knowledge about the Amiga exec.library, the RKRM (rom kernel reference manuals) and perhaps also some of the various filesystems that was used on the Amiga such as pfs, amifilesafe, etc... He is probably also familiar with how gadtools.library and intuition.library worked. There are lots of concepts on the Amiga that ANY reasonably technical Amiga user should be familiar with. Something as stupidly simple as "save", "use" and "cancel" for most preferences, and knowledge about how settings are "used" in ram and saved to disk is wonderful simple thinking. Again any technical minded Amiga user will understand as they got lots of good concepts with the "mother milk" of computing.

While Amiga is commonly mistaken for being "just a friend" it is really a mother that gives you the good teachings in life, or at best a friend with benefits that introduce you to a wonderful world you only dreamed of. Having used and programmed on an Amiga really says a lot. There was a special bond back then between Amiga users that only Amiga users know and understand. I guess similar bonds where for Atari, Spectrum and <insert your favorite system here> users as well, but we knew that our little machine was really something special. Sort of like the girl that was your first true love, never forgotten and still with you in the back your mind even if you learned that certain keys are in different places now...

[danmcgrew]

...Glad to see a project that captures some of the thinking that the Amiga community was so known for.

It never ceases to amaze me that only one comment (and #2, in the queue)...ONE!...can completely derail (up to sixteen comments, currently) what should have been a commentary on a very topical and extremely interesting subject, and one which Michael Larabel offered with the loftiest of intentions: education and enlightenment regarding DragonFly BSD ("...Yes, SailfishOS is irrelevant. I don't know a single person, which [sic] uses it..." Need any further examples?).

It'll be interesting to see how the Raspberry Pi fanbois contingent gets in their two cents' worth.

[ayumu]

On AmigaOS there was no memory protection, that's why it was fast. But AmigaOS still suffered from priority inversion issues. On Dragonfly it's only used in-kernel AFAIK, where it's cheap (and so it is on Linux)

Don't ignore seL4. That's not "in-kernel" IPC, and it is an order of magnitude (no kidding) faster than Linux's, to the point where even if a multi-server architecture system built with seL4 was doing hundreds of times more IPC than Linux, the aggregated overhead of all the IPC would still be lower than Linux's.