From: kevin lyda (kevin at domain suberic.net)
Date: Wed 05 Jul 2000 - 11:40:07 IST
this is in relation to slashdot's article on this article:
http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2000-07-05-001-04-OP
on the whole i think the response to this is interesting. most reactions
on slashdot and linuxtoday think it looks good on the surface but would
like to know more about the configurations. in addition they point
out that benchmarks only prove that the system can perform well for
the benchmark. compare and contrast with the microsoft press releases
following the mindcraft tests...
On Wed, Jul 05, 2000 at 10:08:29AM +0100, Glen Gray wrote:
> In the linked article they mention RedHat Tux 1.0. Have I missed
> something here. What is RedHat Tux 1.0 ???
wonder of wonders a slashdot comment comes in handy. this is from
ingo molnar (i seem to remember him on linux-kernel lists - he works
at redhat now). this is an excellent example of free software
demonstrating a) responsiveness b) a way of integrating things into
the os that is *not* anti-competetive. redhat built on what others
did and those same people (or others) can build on what redhat did.
compare and contrast with microsoft and ftp software (the company).
anyway, the explanation:
i'm the one who designed/wrote most of TUX, and here are some facts
about it.
'TUX' comes from 'Threaded linUX webserver', and is a kernel-space
HTTP subsystem. TUX was written by Red Hat and is based on the 2.4
kernel series. TUX is under the GPL and will be released in a couple
of weeks. TUX's main goal is to enable high-performance webserving on
Linux, and while it's not as feature-full as Apache, TUX is a 'full
fledged' HTTP/1.1 webserver supporting HTTP/1.1 persistent (keepalive)
connections, pipelining, CGI execution, logging, virtual hosting,
various forms of modules, and many other webserver features. TUX
modules can be user-space or kernel-space.
The SPECweb99 test was done with a user-space module, the source code
can be found here. We expect TUX to be integrated into Apache 2.0 or
3.0, as TUX's user-space kernel-space API is capable of supporting
a mixed Apache/TUX webspace.
TUX uses a 'object cache' which is much more than a simple 'static
cache'. TUX objects can be freely embedded in other web replies,
and can be used by modules, including CGIs. You can 'mix' dynamically
generated and static content freely.
While written by Red Hat, TUX relies on many scalability advances
in the 2.4 kernel done also by kernel hackers from SuSE, Mandrake
and the Linux Community as a whole. TUX is not one single piece
of technology, rather a final product that 'connects the dots' and
proves the scalability of Linux's high end features. I'd especially
like to highlight the role of extreme TCP/IP networking scalability
in 2.4, which was a many months effort lead by David Miller and
Alexey Kuznetsov. We'd also like to acknowledge the pioneering role
of khttpd - while TUX is independent of khttpd, it was an important
experiment we learned alot from.
Other 2.4 kernel advances TUX uses are: async networking and disk
IO, wake-one scheduling, interrupt binding, process affinity (not
yet merged patch), per-CPU allocation pools (not yet merged patch),
big file support (the TUX logfile can get bigger than 5GB during
SPECweb99 runs), highmem support, various VFS enhancements (thanks
Al Viro), the new IO-scheduler done by SuSE folks, buffer/pagecache
scalability and many many other Linux features.
so it looks like linux kernal folks, suse, mandrake, redhat and a cast
of thousands have been busy.
kevin
-- kevin at domain suberic.net "there's nothing wrong with windows 2000 that fork()'ed on 37058400 linux can't fix." -- va linux t-shirt meatspace place: work
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