Re: [SLUG] performance of linux vs windows nt/2000

From: Doumbeck1@aol.com
Date: Sun Dec 09 2001 - 18:58:42 EST


Strictly speaking, hardware doesn't perform better or worse for either
system. It is the software which is really being benchmarked. Depending on
the hardware and software involved performance may vary even for like models
running the "same" OS.

Things that deal with actual CPU cycles and infrastructure related stuff,
linux uses the hardware more efficiently/effectively than Windows...On the
other hand, for many multimedia applications, Windows seems to outpace linux
often by a long shot.

The reason is because although linux is a suitable platform for multimedia,
the software written for the w32 codebase has had much more experience in
development for these applications. It will take some time for the
opensource community to really take hold and understand good codewritting for
multimedia. One of the ways this could be helped would be by having a
unified library base for multimedia similarly to the way we have a glibc,
which is an extension and continuation of the unix libc libraries. There are
too many libraries being developed and used only for one app, even though the
authors intent on creating such a library is so that others can use the code
in their apps too. What we see is libs that are used for 1 and 2 apps and
that's it. If there was a unified multimedia lib base that was aggressively
developed and improved by the open source community, within 3 years I would
be willing to bet that multimedia as a whole runs better under linux. Linus
and friends have already taken the cue and have integrated code and devices
into the kernel to take advantage of newer multimedia platform hardware, its
up to the community to unify the effort in the style of GNU glibc. Perhaps
the project managers of the existing multimdia library code base could get
together and merge their code effectively.

disclaimer...I am not a GNU fan, infact at the moment I am not pleased with
RMS, but the glibc project is one of the best managed open source projects
yet.

Scot Mc Pherson



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