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To: TechieGuy-alt who wrote (27110)	2/1/2001 10:58:13 AM
From: Petz	Respond to of 275872

I think on the Linux compiles, we're not seeing the forest but instead, the trees. Linux compiles are a good test to determine whether an MP system is reliable, whether all the tricky MP things are working properly. If there's a cache coherency problem or snooping problem, the compile will crash. Anyone remember the early K6-233 which would crash on a Linux kernel compile if you had more than 32M of RAM? So the important thing is that MP is coming soon and it works! Petz

To: TechieGuy-alt who wrote (27110)	2/1/2001 12:48:55 PM
From: Neil Booth	Respond to of 275872

I don't quite understand that statement. That is total system ram. If what you say is correct (that the entire system ram is used to cache accesses from disk and available after a program exists), then after the first compile, if one does a "free", one will not see any system ram free. Linux (and other O/S) don't cache files on a per-process basis, they just cache files. That's what cache is when you type free. The memory is free to give to processes, but unused memory is wasted memory, so Linux uses whatever isn't being used elsewhere for caching (apart from a small emergency pool of a few megs). NT does not seem to do this - at least on my 512MB machine at work it reports a whole load of memory that genuinely seems to be free and not cache. Linux is actually extremely agressive at caching, more so than other O/S's. It's also, I think, the only O/S with a dcache for path lookups, which gives it pretty fast file system operations. Basically, it rocks <g>. Neil.