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Microsoft’s Other OS
By Martin English | November 7, 2005
Like any pure Research project, Singularity <PDF> has no definitive future. Microsoft could opt to commercialize it as is, embed elements of it in other products or simply rely on the learnings from the project to inform other efforts at the company.
“What would a software platform look like if it was designed from scratch with the primary goal of dependability?”
more info at Microsoft Watch
Some of the stuff in the PDF is interesting – for example, page 31 has benchmark statistics showing Linux (and FreeBSD) to be better than Windows.
The table shows the CPU cost of six different types of operations: “Read Cycle Counter”, “ABI Call”, “Thread yield”, “2 thread wait-set ping pong”, “2 message ping pong” and “Create and start process”.
For the first one, Windows seems to kick the butt of all others handily with Singularity being the worst of the bunch. For “ABI Call”, each OS used different system calls that “operate on a readily available data structure in the respective kernels.” The system calls seem to be completely different so I don’t know if this test is valid, but the results show Singularity an order of magnitude more efficient than the others, with Linux beating Windows by a considerable margin and Windows beating FreeBSD by an equally considerable margin.
For the “thread yield” tests, FreeBSD & Linux are equal, Windows beats them by a reasonable percentage and Singularity is more than twice as fast as the Unixes. For the “2 wait-set ping pong”, which measures “the cost of switching between two threads in the same process through a synchronization object”, the chart shows that Singularity is somewhat more efficient than Windows and Windows is more than twice as fast as the Unixes. For the “2 message ping pong”, which shows the cost of sending a 1-byte message back and forth between two processes, Singularity is 4 times more efficient than Linux, which is somewhat better than Windows, which kicks FreeBSDs butt decisively.
Lastly, for “Create and start process”, Singularity is twice as fast as Linux, which is about 50% faster than FreeBSD. Windows comes out 7 times slower than Linux on this test. I don’t know how much that matters in the real world since creating and starting a process is not something that is done hundreds of times a second.
All that said, it should probably be pointed out that there are many ways to measure an OS. The M$ guys may have simply picked the ones that support their “see we don’t suck” position. And given that Singularity is not a complete OS, I would expect that more overhead will be added later that will bring down these numbers. I guess we’ll see.
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