31–40 of 52 posts
First line of article: Replacing a sort algorithm in the FreeBSD kernel has improved its boot speed by a factor of 100 or more This is obviously not true.
It's a bit of clonky writing, but in proper English "its boot speed" relates to the algorithm and not the FreeBSD kernel
Having a tough time understanding the impacts of this work. Fast boot times matter if you boot often. So what’s the use case here? Hmm, actually I’m not sure I even understand the whole “serverless” thing that much to be honest. Running FreeBSD as if it’s a “process” on Linux is interesting in a way but - who does this?
If you fired a bullet at 450m/s at a FreeBSD machine sitting 50 feet away, it would have enough time to boot up and perform operations before being struck and destroyed by the bullet.
For ICBM test warheads they have a system that replaces the nuclear pit with a sensor package that measures the incoming shockfront, does signal processing and gets out a radio signal before the entire thing is crushed.
If you fired a bullet at 450m/s at a FreeBSD machine sitting 50 feet away, it would have enough time to boot up and perform operations before being struck and destroyed by the bullet.
For ICBM test warheads they have a system that replaces the nuclear pit with a sensor package that measures the incoming shockfront, does signal processing and gets out a radio signal before the entire thing is crushed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For ICBM test warheads they have a system that replaces the nuclear pit with a sensor package that measures the incoming shockfront, does signal processing and gets out a radio signal before the entire thing is crushed.
Does this have a name? A keyword I could search for? A wikipedia page?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For ICBM test warheads they have a system that replaces the nuclear pit with a sensor package that measures the incoming shockfront, does signal processing and gets out a radio signal before the entire thing is crushed.
Does this have a name? A keyword I could search for? A wikipedia page?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYdAT0v4DHs (Scott Manley)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For ICBM test warheads they have a system that replaces the nuclear pit with a sensor package that measures the incoming shockfront, does signal processing and gets out a radio signal before the entire thing is crushed.
So if folks truly cared, it's possible to design a computer system to boot up, in a barebones fashion, and then do meaningful work and then transmit it, in under a millisecond?
For many simple embedded systems that plug into the wall, the "boot" process will happen in under a millisecond. But it will take considerably longer than that for the voltage levels to stabilize.
The real thing which differentiates these from a PC or phone is that they are not running what we would typically call an OS. They may be running an RTOS (a very simplified OS), but for many of them, as soon as they have stable power, they are off to the races (Just like the home-computers of the 80s. Just plug in and go.)
> I believe Linux is at 75-80 ms for the same environment where I have FreeBSD booting in 25 ms. From the article, Colin Percival on how Linux does as well. Impressive (though would be good to see other benchmarks to corroborate Colin's). (Which is an HN comment actually: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37205578 .)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For ICBM test warheads they have a system that replaces the nuclear pit with a sensor package that measures the incoming shockfront, does signal processing and gets out a radio signal before the entire thing is crushed.
So if folks truly cared, it's possible to design a computer system to boot up, in a barebones fashion, and then do meaningful work and then transmit it, in under a millisecond?
Having a tough time understanding the impacts of this work. Fast boot times matter if you boot often. So what’s the use case here? Hmm, actually I’m not sure I even understand the whole “serverless” thing that much to be honest. Running FreeBSD as if it’s a “process” on Linux is interesting in a way but - who does this?
> Hmm, actually I’m not sure I even understand the whole “serverless” thing that much to be honest. A whole bunch of folks have given up on shared operating systems at a security, access control, data governance, and maintainability (reproducibility) level. At least if your goal is to create software for some purpose other than building server infrastructure. Some of them have decided that if you’re going to want thi…
Arguably POSIX doesn't really matter anymore does it? It's Linux or it doesn't matter in a lot of cases (sadly).
Seems like overkill. Sometimes optimal solutions are the available ones, sure, but is no one working on a POSIX exokernel "includeos" like thing?