Newbie
Newbie
- Subject: Newbie
- From: "Eduardo I. Jiménez" <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 2 Dec 2001 12:48:26 -0500
Hello everyone.
I am a newbie to kernel development. I am using MacOS X and I'm trying
to get Darwin (it's hell not having DSL or Cable modem available in my
area, do you think the Apple Store would burn it for me?). Anyway, I am
pretty experienced with C/C++ and UNIX and still remember many OS basics
from university classes in OS, distributed and parallel systems. I would
like to know where to start.
The first thing I would like to ask, before getting to any specific task
is, do you have any performance testing plan or system benchmark that
could allow us to test the performance of Darwin (in all areas), both to
test performance of kernel improvements and to compare those results to
other OSs or UNIXes?. I would like to focus on kernel performance
(scheduling, memory management, drivers, multithreading, SMP).
I have one question for which you may have an answer. Why is the maxproc
limit in OS X set so low?. Granted, in most Linuxes its 256 (and that's
the max) but in OS X 10.1.1 its 100. If one is to have an enterprise
server, this may seem too little. Now, I don't know what Darwin's
processing unit is, threads or processes. I guess it should be
processes, which would mean that this limit does not apply to threads,
which would mean that a process could have an (unlimited?) number of
them. Am I right?.
Now, what do the stack and datasize limits mean?. I used to think that
in modern virtual memory systems there was no limit to a process
datasize or stack space but the VM limit itself. What did I get wrong?.
In Linux these values default to 8192KB and unlimited respectively. Any
reason why OS X has 6144KB (odd amount, don't you think?) for datasize
and 512KB for stack size.
Another question, is there any documentation that would describe the
internals of the kernel so I can start looking at the source code?
Thanks a lot, and I hope I can help improve what I think is a remarkable
effort.
Eduardo Jimenez
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- From: "Eduardo I. Jiménez" <email@hidden>