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Stark wrote:Praxis, I'm certain the lack of TPM chips in newer Macs has already been mentioned to RThurmont by either you or Durandal.

RThurmont wrote:But that's my point, who would want to legally run OS X?

It's basically BSD,

but retarded with layers and layers of unneccessary, poorly designed GUI,

no built-in virtualization capability

(though this is rumored for Leopard), and proprietary APIs.

BTW, my source for saying OS X is slow is my own experience. However, here is some benchmarking to back it up. In my experience though, whenever I have more than five tabs open in Safari, the system will slow to an absolute crawl.

Praxis, I'm certain the lack of TPM chips in newer Macs has already been mentioned to RThurmont by either you or Durandal.

Dang, the stupidity continues. Where does this even come from?

Mac OS X is about 2 GB. It comes with about 13 GB of extra software (iDVD, iPhoto, iTunes, GarageBand, etc, etc, etc).

That's MINISCULE compared to the stock 250 GB hard drive and the maxed-out 3 TB of space that system can have.

Yeah great idea. Then you could do ... um, what, with it, exactly?

No, there's one layer (called Quartz), and according to most reviews, it's very well-designed. Much better than the trash coming out of Redmond or the Linux distros these days.

By the way, if you compile that test with the optimized malloc() that Linux uses, the performance gap basically disappears.

Yes it had been, but my suggestion is that Apple might well resume shipping Macs with them, and additionally have the new version potentially use them, out of the box.

I would be really suprised if Leopard in fact does not in fact utilize Apple's trusted platform module to ensure that it only is used on Apple hardware.

Woah hold it for a minute. Nowhere did I imply that Mac OS X would take up the entire hard disk. What I intended to convey was that it would be dumb to waste the entire HD on the OS X operating system, as opposed to, at a minimum, creating another partition, and installing Linux to it.

Enjoy the benefits of open source software, get hardware virtualization out of the box (assuming the Xeon supports that, and I'd assume it does, considering that a fair number of lower end Intels also have that feature), and get an overall improvement in system performance.

So who cares if virtualization isn't out of the box? There's multiple products to do it (like VMWare Fusion, Parallels, etc)

And the system performance improvement bit has already been refuted.

RThurmont wrote:Nowhere, Praxis, in the above post, did I state that I thought that Apple would prevent people with Macs lacking the TPM to upgrade. However, what I did say is that I would not be suprised if Apple enabled the feature, for the Macs that had it. Assuming they did enable this feature, they would probably include code to detect Macs that didn't have the TPM, and supply some alternative DRM scheme (perhaps analogous to the Windows activation feature) for those systems. If you attempted to install on a machine lacking a TPM, the specifications of which were not the same as a Mac known to not have the TPM, then it would of course refuse to install.

Then what is the logic in Apple removing TPM?

No, you're just grasping at straws.

So who cares if virtualization isn't out of the box? There's multiple products to do it (like VMWare Fusion, Parallels, etc)

Yes, and the aforementioned products are proprietary, and at least in the case of Parallels, expensive (I don't know if VMWare is going to give away Fusion or not, but somehow, I doubt it). KVM ships with the Linux 2.6.20 Kernel, and is fully open source.

There are open-source virtualization software for Mac too, such as Q.

Nothing has the polish of Parallels though. Parallels installs special drivers, + Kaperski antivirus, if you're running Windows that streamlines interface with the virtual machine...much better than anything else I've used.

And the system performance improvement bit has already been refuted.

No it hasn't.

RThurmont wrote:To be clear, I did not literally mean that there were multiple layers, I meant layers and layers in a metaphorical sense, however, I admit that looked vague, and I concede that point. However, I do not concede that the OS X GUI is well designed, and I am of the opinion that the KDE UI, at the very least, is vastly superior to that of OS X in most respects. GNOME is superior, I would argue, if for no other reason than it's quite a bit faster.

Also, in my opinion, you're taking an unjustified dump on the massive amounts of UI research Microsoft conducted in the early 1990s, that lead to such innovations as the task bar and start menu, which IMO are one heck of a lot better than the messy kludge known as the "Dock" that OS X uses for program launching/switching.

One of my biggest gripes with Apple is a company is its continual, unwarranted bashing of its competitors, which, in my opinion, is unethical,

obnoxious, and in some cases, downright offensive.

Microsoft is also guilty of this, although to a much lesser degree in my opinion.

Then why doesn't OS X use that malloc by default??? Could it be, gasp, bad design?

RThurmont wrote:Nowhere, Praxis, in the above post, did I state that I thought that Apple would prevent people with Macs lacking the TPM to upgrade. However, what I did say is that I would not be suprised if Apple enabled the feature, for the Macs that had it. Assuming they did enable this feature, they would probably include code to detect Macs that didn't have the TPM, and supply some alternative DRM scheme (perhaps analogous to the Windows activation feature) for those systems. If you attempted to install on a machine lacking a TPM, the specifications of which were not the same as a Mac known to not have the TPM, then it would of course refuse to install.

I would be really suprised if Leopard in fact does not in fact utilize Apple's trusted platform module to ensure that it only is used on Apple hardware.

Yes, and the aforementioned products are proprietary, and at least in the case of Parallels, expensive (I don't know if VMWare is going to give away Fusion or not, but somehow, I doubt it). KVM ships with the Linux 2.6.20 Kernel, and is fully open source.

There are open-source virtualization software for Mac too, such as Q.

Why? Are you unfamiliar with capitalism?

Ignoring that OSX has an open source kernel.

RThurmont wrote:

Ignoring that OSX has an open source kernel.

Open source according to the OSI, but not Free Software according to the FSF. The APSL requires that all changes be submitted upstream to Apple, which, in my opinion, is obnoxious.

RThurmont wrote:

Ignoring that OSX has an open source kernel.

Open source according to the OSI, but not Free Software according to the FSF. The APSL requires that all changes be submitted upstream to Apple, which, in my opinion, is obnoxious.

EDIT: Just because Darwin isn't in your RMS <censored> doesn't mean you can arbitrarily exclude it from being Open Source. When the OSI, the body that SAYS what the <censored> is and isn't OSS, says that the APSL is an Open Source license, that means it's Open <censored> Source.

Destructionator XIII wrote:

Praxis wrote:The GUI is certainly better than Linux's inconsistency.

Linux GUIs can suck sheep dick (GNOME comes to mind), but they can be pretty ok too, and pretty consistant if you take the right collection of apps. Depends on your own preferences and needs. But certainly not for everyone.

Of course, the Mac isn't for everyone either. I personally can't stand it, and would pick Linux over it any time, any dayy.

For example, Windows is stable

RThurmont wrote:

Ignoring that OSX has an open source kernel.

Open source according to the OSI, but not Free Software according to the FSF. The APSL requires that all changes be submitted upstream to Apple, which, in my opinion, is obnoxious.

RThurmont wrote:I do have a number of gripes with it in terms of licensing,

interaction design,

performance,

and features,

Praxis wrote:EDIT: Interestingly, Intel doesn't sell quad-core 3 GHz Xeons; Cloverton is 2.66. Does Apple have early release chips, or are they overclocking?

Apple's new Mac Pro uses special-run Xeon
Apple's updated Mac Pro uses a special version of Intel's Xeon workstation-class processor, the semiconductor company said in an e-mail note. The 3GHz quad-core CPU at the heart of the fastest system is currently an unannounced model that sits at the top of the company's performance range and is presently used only by Apple.

"We are indeed shipping a 3.0GHz Xeon version [and] expect to see faster gigahertz speeds for our high-end [Core 2] Extreme PCs very soon, too," said Intel's Bill Kircos. "For now, the product is in limited production and Apple has chosen to adopt it. We will introduce another 3.0GHz Xeon SKU later on as well."

The model in question is the Xeon X5365, according to additional comments by Intel's Italian PR director Ruben Simpliciano. The chip currently outpaces the official fastest quad-core processor from Intel, the 2.66GHz Xeon 5355, while maintaining the 8MB of total level 2 cache and 1333MHz system bus of its predecessors.

Apple has recently been found using special Intel processors in some of its devices, such as the 1GHz Pentium M modified to run at lower power levels inside the Apple TV media hub.

Praxis wrote: I'm going to complain about performance despite having failed to provide any evidence for such a complaint outside of a quickly-refuted completely invalid optimized memory allocation test.

Johan De Gelas wrote: "Mac OS X Server starts with Darwin, the same open source foundation used in Mac OS X, Apple's operating system for desktop and mobile computers. Darwin is built around the Mach 3.0 microkernel, which provides features critical to server operations, such as fine-grained multi-threading, symmetric multiprocessing (SMP), protected memory, a unified buffer cache (UBC), 64-bit kernel services and system notifications. Darwin also includes the latest innovations from the open source BSD community, particularly the FreeBSD development community."

While there are many very good ideas in Mac OS X, it reminds me a lot of fusion cooking, where you make a hotch-potch of very different ingredients. Let me explain.
Darwin is indeed the open Source project around the Mach kernel 3.0. This operating system is based around the idea of a microkernel, a kernel that only contains the essence of the operating system, such as protected memory, fine-grained multithreading and symmetric multiprocessing support. This in contrast to "monolithic" operating systems, which have all of the code in a single large kernel.

Everything else is located in smaller programs, servers, which communicate with each other via ports and an IPC (Inter Process Communication) system. Explaining this in detail is beyond the scope of this article (read more here). But in a nutshell, a Mach microkernel should be more elegant, easier to debug and better at keeping different processes from writing in eachother's protected memory areas than our typical "monolithic" operating systems such as Linux and Windows NT/XP/2000. The Mach microkernel was believed to be the future of all operating systems.

However, you must know that applications (in the userspace) need, of course, access to the services of the kernel. In Unix, this is done with a Syscall, and it results in two context switches (the CPU has to swap out one process for another): from the application to the kernel and back.

The relatively complicated memory management (especially if the server process runs in user mode instead of kernel) and IPC messaging makes a call to the Mach kernel a lot slower, up to 6 times slower than the monolithic ones!

It also must be remarked that, for example, Linux is not completely a monolithic OS. You can choose whether you like to incorporate a driver in the kernel (faster, but more complex) or in userspace (slower, but the kernel remains slimmer).

Now, while Mac OS X is based on Mach 3, it is still a monolithic OS. The Mach microkernel is fused into a traditional FreeBSD "system call" interface. In fact, Darwin is a complete FreeBSD 4.4 alike UNIX and thus monolithic kernel, derived from the original 4.4BSD-Lite2 Open Source distribution.

The current Mac OS X has evolved a bit and consists of a FreeBSD 5.0 kernel (with a Mach 3 multithreaded microkernel inside) with a proprietary, but superb graphical user interface (GUI) called Aqua.

Performance problems
As the mach kernel is hidden away deep in the FreeBSD kernel, Mach (kernel) threads are only available for kernel level programs, not applications such as MySQL. Applications can make use of a POSIX thread (a " pthread"), a wrapper around a Mach thread.


This means that applications use slower user-level threads like in FreeBSD and not fast kernel threads like in Linux. It seems that FreeBSD 5.x has somewhat solved the performance problems that were typical for user-level threads, but we are not sure if Mac OS X has been able to take advantage of this.

In order to maintain binary compatibility, Apple might not have been able to implement some of the performance improvements found in the newer BSD kernels.

Another problem is the way threads could/can get access to the kernel. In the early versions of Mac OS X, only one thread could lock onto the kernel at once. This doesn't mean only one thread can run, but that only one thread could access the kernel at a given time. So, a rendering calculation (no kernel interaction) together with a network access (kernel access) could run well. But many threads demanding access to the memory or network subsystem would result in one thread getting access, and all others waiting.

This "kernel locked bottleneck" situation has improved in Tiger, but kernel locking is still very coarse. So, while there is a very fine grained multi-threading system (The Mach kernel) inside that monolithic kernel, it is not available to the outside world.

So, is Mac OS X the real reason why MySQL and Apache run so slow on the Mac Platform? Let us find out... with benchmarks, of course!

........


Mac OS X is incredibly slow, between 2 and 5(!) times slower, in creating new threads, as it doesn't use kernel threads, and has to go through extra layers (wrappers). No need to continue our search: the G5 might not be the fastest integer CPU on earth - its database performance is completely crippled by an asthmatic operating system that needs up to 5 times more time to handle and create threads.

........


The server performance of the Apple platform is, however, catastrophic. When we asked Apple for a reaction, they told us that some database vendors, Sybase and Oracle, have found a way around the threading problems. We'll try Sybase later, but frankly, we are very sceptical. The whole "multi-threaded Mach microkernel trapped inside a monolithic FreeBSD cocoon with several threading wrappers and coarse-grained threading access to the kernel", with a "backwards compatibility" millstone around its neck sounds like a bad fusion recipe for performance.

Xisiqomelir wrote:Intel must be ecstatic to have Apple as a partner.