Starship Trooper's Journal: Linux 2.4 is an incredible step backwards

by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 23, @01:46PM (#2338415)

[ed: my last AC troll, and the first truly successful troll penned by myself. This is the one that showed me the true potential of trolling, and inspired the creation of this account and my subsequent descent into depraved, unwashed, heathen trollery. :-) -S.Trooper]

The 2.2 series of Linux kernels were indeed impressive works, with stability and performance on par with the far more expensive products put out by commercial entities such Microsoft and Sun. Unfortunately, Linus and the other kernel developers decided to sit on their laurels as Windows, Solaris, and even FreeBSD surpassed Linux in almost every category, and then tried to "catch up" by pushing out a half-baked "2.4" kernel. Unfortunately, this gaffe has made Linux into all but a laughingstock of an operating system.

• The copy-on-record algorithm used by the new VM is a horrible, O(n) NP-complete way of managing swap space. Any CS undergrad could come up with at least 20 better ways of managing the swap space, such as inverse buffer-partitioning or full-duplex write caching, which are used in FreeBSD to good effect.
• The new ReiserFS's attribute-tree modeling produces even more pathetic disk performance. Opening a file takes three times longer than ext2fs in 2.2 kernels, and almost five times longer than using Windows 2000's block-spacing scheme used in NTFS. It is truly a pathetic, rushed product, whose mediocrity is hidden behind meaningless buzzwords such as "journalling".
• The 2.4 developers made a huge mistake by replacing the 2.2 kernel's direct bus device management with a much clunkier frontside multiplex. This extra abstraction means that Linux has no chance of ever matching the AGP throughput of Windows, which is a necessary acheivement if Linux ever hopes to make headway into the home environment. Performance of all other devices, including USB devices, parallel-port printers, and IDE hard drives, is far lower than any competing operating system. The decreased hard drive performance is especially staggering when coupled with ReiserFS's depressed filesystem speed, making the whole Linux system entirely inadequate for even simple server tasks such as web serving.

It's plain to see that Linux 2.4 will never get off the ground; future versions promise only to bring more poorly-implemented systems into the fold. It is sad to see such a promising system waste away so; I would suggest using a 2.2 kernel to people interested in Linux, except that those kernels have been obsoleted by almost every other product in the marketplace. If you want to learn Unix, I suggest you go with Solaris or FreeBSD instead, or to just forget it and use Windows XP.