[sf-lug] Mac emergency Help

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Justin Ryan (justizin at vongogo.org):

> Linux kernel can be a good bit faster for io-dedicated machines, but
> it's difficult to say Darwin's microkernel won't perform better
> running a single-process app on a dual-core machine.

Darwin (or, I should say, xnu) is not really a microkernel.  

CMU Mach (2.5, and later 3.0) is of course a microkernel, but once all
of the BSD layers and scaffolding were welded onto NeXT's fork of it,
the result was very distinctly no longer a microkernel, but rather a
slightly weird, mostly-monolithic BSD kernel, and not a particularly
fast one, either.  ;->

> Main thing about the Mac is they bootstrap using something Intel has
> been begging Microsoft to adopt since before I was old enough to
> drive. ;)

Ah, yes, EFI.  I ran into that when I helped build a 4096-CPU Itanic
HPC cluster.