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A Quick Look at Longhorn Build 4053
Posted by
timothy
on Sun Mar 07, 2004 04:01 PM
from the look-away-look-away-look-away dept.
from the look-away-look-away-look-away dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Even though the next generation Windows product is not due until late 2005 or even 2006, here is a look at what Microsoft has in store for it's future operating system. 'Without a vast amount of tweaking, this build is a resource hog. At idle, with no applications running, the commit charge is at a whopping 483 MB!! Obviously, the final release or even the beta releases will not consume this much of the system resources.'"
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A Quick Look at Longhorn Build 4053
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Re:Why is that obvious? (Score:5, Insightful)
Obvious? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://slashdot.org/~MuParadigm/journal/ | Last Journal: Tuesday September 09 2003, @06:23AM)
"At idle, with no applications running, the commit charge is at a whopping 483 MB!! Obviously, the final release or even the beta releases will not consume this much of the system resources."
MS typically aims at having the OS consume, or fit into, about a quarter of whatever amount of memory is considered standard at the time.
Now, by the time Longhorn rolls out in 2007 or so, it's likely that 2 GB of RAM, if not 4, will be standard on most new systems. So I'd say MS is probably aiming at a 512 MB base for Longhorn. Maybe 256 or 384, but there's nothing in MS's history to indicate that they would have a problem releasing an OS that consumes 512MB.
Re:prove it (Score:5, Informative)
(Last Journal: Monday February 13 2006, @07:11PM)
Not really. Windows XP was over 2000 though. There are some huge underlying changes -- not a 100% rewrite -- but some major rewrites anyway. For example is the Windows programming API switched from Win32 to WinFX, and a whole lot retrofitted for the
In total, I'd expect Longhorn to bring about as many rewrites as there was from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95.
Re:Obvious? (Score:5, Informative)
This is crap...
Testing both 4051 and 4053, even with all the 'extra features' turned on, the commit charge is around 240mb.
Additionally, there are about 50-100mb of Services for Microsoft reporting that is running and is used ONLY for reporting to internal servers at Microsoft for the developers at Microsoft. And thse services can and should be turned off, since outside testers are NOT using these services.
Some of our developers are running Longhorn in VMWare and VirtualPC with it set to 196mb and 256mb of RAM for the guest OS. And it runs better than expected for a pre-beta.
Let's dog on Longhorn when it gets to RC1, the current Alphas are so far away from the shipping product it isn't even close.
This reminds me of Windows 2000 when it was Beta 1 back in 1997, it was a TOTALLY different OS than even Beta 2 or RC1. Beta 1 of Windows 2000 had very few features working properly and was slow as hell compared to the release version.
Considering the time table of Longhorn, 2 years is a lot of time for a lot optimization and it already has a solid NT core that the redesigned Windows Subsystem will run on.
If all else fails, I would bet money that when longhorn releases it will run as fast as WindowsXP, even on comperable hardware, although you may have to turn off many of the 'resource intense' features of Longhorn to make it run well on lower end hardware.
TheNetAvenger
Re:Why is that obvious? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Why is that obvious? (Score:5, Insightful)
They goal is help their customers sell more product. That means give to their customer's customers pretty bright beads and *CAN NOT* work on existing (well slowly at least). This leads to the people buying BIG compters from MS Customers allowing for MS to sell the product twice!!
Can you say "More profit!"
Re:Apple (Score:5, Interesting)
Upgrading 1,000,000 customers vs. 80,000,000 - your support and documentation has to be that much better.
Believe it or not, I think Windows 2000 / Windows XP is as stable as linux / Freebsd. I didn't say better, I didn't say more secure... but I think the stablish issue is mute. considering how much more crappy hardware and hardware drivers windows supports - of course more people are going ot have crashes. But on the 10,000 combinations of _good hardware and drivers_ it works fine.
Remember kids, only takes one driver to lockup the PCI bus (IRQ / DMA / etc). I've seen bad USB drivers bring down Linux/FreeBSD/OpenBSD/windows XP - all latest versions with patches.
Re:Apple (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.alienmelon.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday September 08 2004, @07:49AM)
I've come to the conclusion it's crappy hardware that renders, otherwise good PCs, into something a wee better than cardboard boxes.
Re:Apple (Score:4, Informative)
(http://slashdot.org/)
I know it may seem like magic to you but there really is always a reason. Computers are deterministic; everything they do has a cause.
My bet would be faulty memory. Just a guess though.
What a strange argument (Score:5, Insightful)
Is that meant to spoof the old "more Windows viruses because it's more popular" myth?
If a company has to write 2 drivers, which one are they more likely to spend time writing and testing properly: the one that will be used on 95% of desktops or the one that will be used on 5% of desktops? Even the large companies that can write decent drivers often write their Linux drivers in a rush, usually after some big customer asks for it and they're facing the loss of a big sale.
Of course, one could argue that a company that doesn't have the resources to make a decent driver won't even bother with the Linux market. But such no-name companies mostly just use common chipsets anyway, most of which have good drivers.
Re:Apple (Score:5, Informative)
I don't really know how modern Windows versions stack up in terms of stability. Win98 and earlier releases were horrible, and some people seem determined to pretend it's still like that five years after the fact, but it's been my experience (with a lot of installations) that Windows XP/2k really don't crash much, except for hardware/power problems, and weirdness with third party programs.
Defending Windows on Slashdot is probably asking for bad karma...
Re:Apple (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://fwarren.homelinux.net/)
Meanwhile over in Windows Land, Joe sixpack can't even load the program because he has about 10% resources free because there are 30 items running in his tray...hmmm how did I get three copies of WeathreBug running? Not to mention spyware and mailware running in the background.
Yup, with the right hardware, and keeping Joes Sixpack off the internet and your windows box will run well. I just fear for the day when all the spyware gets ported to Linux and I have to clean that crap up for folks......
Re:Apple (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://slashdot.org/)
To be sure, they've done WONDERS with the stability. When I was using XP as my home operating system, it wasn't too bad. The problem that I've found with XP is that as load ramps up, it's ability to stay stable and usable trends downward increasingly quickly.
Oh, and its dual-processor support is pretty pathetic. The load balancing seems incredibly naive. (And, this may not be an OS problem, but I find that I have problems scrolling text in VS.NET in a timely fashion. Not all the time, but sometimes it'll just stall when trying to do something that I consider a simplistic task.)
Re:Apple (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Now, I work for a company with sysadmins, and they do a good job of taking care of my machine. We make sure it's patched, that we've got the latest drivers, and that the hardware is all running well.
I have no bizarre third party applications running, besides the usual things that should have nothing to to with stability. I use Emacs, Opera, VS.NET, iTunes and PuTTY throughout the day.
Some days, I have no problems. Other days, the problems just stack up. I occasionally have the machine lock up on shut down. I used to have the machine crash 2 or 3 times a week, but I stopped playing Diablo II so much. For whatever reason, XP REALLY doesn't like me playing Diablo II. Blaming things on Diablo II won't work, though - XP should be more than robust enough to handle something like that.
A while back, it would have been more likely that I would have agreed with you. I was running a shell and desktop replacement, but I've switched back to the ordinary base shell now. Nothing I run should be an issue.
As for Linux, I only had it crash a couple of times. Once, when I was playing around with experimental drivers, and a couple times when I was playing with beta kernels. I also had the windowing system crash a few times, but another networked machine always found the box up and running. (I also had some lockups related to heat when my Celeron 300A was starting to go.)
Considering the amount of work I do, I don't really find there to be much excuse for XP dying on me. I think I'm most willing to blame it on VS.NET which is incredibly unstable on its own, crashing and coredumping and giving me internal compiler errors several times a week. I wouldn't be suprised if it were running wild and occasionally kicking the system out from underneath me.
Like I said, as a home system, XP worked GREAT for me. I was running Dual-Head on an ATI, playing lots of games, etc. As a development system, it's been brutal. I have pretty standard high-end hardware (getting older, so not quite as high-end now, but still, a Ti4400 is not exactly bottom of the barrel) and I run standard XBox dev tools. Most of my colleagues have similar problems, though perhaps a little less often than I do.
I'm not really trying to rag on XP particularily much, merely trying to point out that from a stability point of view, I don't think it holds a candle to any UNIX that I've ever worked with. OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Solaris, IRIX, AIX, Linux, OS X and even HP-UX (ick, BTW) seem to be more solid.
Re:Everyone does this... look at OS X (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Tuesday September 23 2003, @04:07PM)
OS X will use as much RAM as it can - it caches apps and data you use a lot to cut down on time accessing the disk. I have a gig in my machine and OS X is using 892.8 megs, with 12 days of uptime and ten apps currently running. However, I bet that bits of apps I don't have launched right now, like Photoshop and Preview and Acquisition, are cached, because I tend to launch them a lot.
I'm not saying that modern OSes don't use a lot of RAM, cause they do. But the fact that the OS is using almost a gig of RAM on my machine is not a sign of inefficiency.
Re:Why is that obvious? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://nerds.palmdrive.net/)
What is the point of showing these numbers then?
In other news:
Apple is working on a ultra-mini iPod. The pre-beta-alpha version we got our hands on weighted 20 pounds and was bigger than my G5. Of course, the final version will be smaller and lighter. One could still wonder where Apple is heading at with such a bulky product.
Foreword: If you have nothing relevant to say, don't say anything!
Re:Why is that obvious? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://nekobox.org/)
Why is it obvious that an OS in two years won't consume 400mb of ram?
What will the base system Microsoft target contain, in terms of memory?
Right now 512mb of ram is $100.
In a year then it might be $50 or $60. Or it might mean a base system will contain 1gb of ram, and everyone will have 64bit CPUs capable of addressing 16gb, or 32gb of ram. We already have desktops today that can address 8gb, and we're only waiting on ram sticks to increase in density.
Re:Why is that obvious? (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.gentoo.org/)
Bill Gates himself answered this question years ago.
Re:Why is that obvious? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://nekobox.org/)
It's a legitimate point, I asked why it was obvious the final release will take less memory?
I would fully expect all OSes in 2005 to take more than 256mb; possibly even 512mb. Microsoft would just happen to be one of many. If this were a Linux article, I would have asked the same question. I use a Mac, and I *know* how much memory OS X likes, and am under no illusions that 10.5 won't take as much!
Resources (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Resources (Score:5, Informative)
So the 2006 consumer-machines might habe 512MB of RAM. But if 483 are needed just for Windows not much is left..
Re:Resources (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Resources (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Monday February 27 2006, @09:54PM)
Re:Resources (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://slashdot.org/)
So the submitter's comment that "Obviously, the final release or even the beta releases will not consume this much of the system resources" isn't necessarily true.
uhh (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:uhh (Score:5, Informative)
(http://jesusislife.net/micah/ | Last Journal: Monday November 24 2003, @02:09AM)
I have run Kernel 2.6.2 on a 486 with 16MB RAM. It wasn't doing a lot, mind you, but it had a few megs free. (It was NOT running X.)
Re:uhh (Score:5, Informative)
(http://hivearchive.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday March 07 2002, @10:39PM)
The other thing to be careful of is top and other memory reporting utilities report X as taking up far more RAM than it actually uses. This is because X mmaps your video card memory. So if you had 128 megs of video RAM, your X would look pretty huge.
Let's get this out of the way (Score:5, Funny)
(http://aliencow.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday November 04 2004, @05:03PM)
Perhaps it's ready now? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:That's a lot of builds (Score:4, Funny)
Nah, just feels that way cause they take so long to compile.
Re:That's a lot of builds (Score:5, Informative)
Re:That's a lot of builds (Score:5, Informative)
That build number is the build of the overall NT kernel and code branch, not just of Longhorn. For example:
Windows NT 3.1 = build 511
Windows NT 3.5 = build 887
Windows NT 3.51 = build 1057
Windows NT 4.0 = build 1381
Windows 2000 = build 2195
Windows XP = build 2600
Windows Server 2003 = build 3790
(FYI, those are for the original release versions. Betas have earlier build numbers.)
Final Release (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://web.mac.com/crackedbutter | Last Journal: Monday January 01 2007, @07:57PM)
No actually, they have the all important Brushed... I mean Slate look in place, so thats development pretty much wrapped up on this version.
OS "improvements"