Friday, April 28, 2006

Treasure trove of hoary Sun OS research

I ran across this while poking around the opensolaris site yesterday. While I've read some of these papers in the past, seeing them collected together makes you realize just how differently OS'es could have turned out. In 1988, for example, most people were implementing shared libraries (if they were implemented at all) in the kernel, rather than as applications utilizing general facilities like mmap. It makes you wonder what we're doing now that will seem completely archaic and backwards in twenty years.

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Intel quietly backing away from VT performance claims

Intel seems to be resetting expectations about VT performance now that the genie's out of the bottle. I get a lot of questions about VT performance, and the questions usually end with, "How much faster is it?" The answer, of course, is "it depends," and just what it depends on turns out to be the more interesting question. I'm preparing something more satisfying than the usual teases I've been dropping in this blog so far; stay tuned!