Unix
Written by Michael Lankton Sunday, 22 November 2009 17:21
My introduction to unix came in college via Digital Unix. After giving linux a spin in its infancy I've been using FreeBSD since around 1995. There is always at least one BSD box in my house, and I've pretty much split my time between NeXT/OS X and BSD since 1996.
Some time around the turn of the millenium, a new version of FreeBSD broke something on the box I was running it on. Broke as in I lost some functionality I had before, or stability was compromised. I don't exactly remember. Anyway I dabbled with linux and Solaris, and just couldn't stomach either. I ended up running OpenBSD for a while, and was happy with it. I engaged in the openbsd-misc mailing list, and as I recall I even had a couple of pleasant conversations with Theo de Raadt. This came as something of a surprise given his reputation, and my feeling at the time was that Theo was a smart guy that didn't suffer fools, and I was just fine with that.
Eventually I said something in a discussion that drew his ire, and he laid into me. I looked for it in the list archives but didn't have any luck finding it to use as an example. Anyway, I was a serious young man at the time and my response to getting flamed by Theo was "FU and F your os, bitch", and I stopped using OpenBSD.
Years have gone by and I'm older now. I don't have any hard feelings toward Theo or OpenBSD. On the contrary, we are lucky to have pioneers like Theo, and I very much respect the contributions that OpenBSD has made to open source and system security. I don't know what made me think of it the other day, but I did, and it gave me an idea.
Written by Michael Lankton Tuesday, 13 October 2009 20:11
Apple heralded OS X 10.6 with "0 new features.". The Windows crowd smugly calls Snow Leopard a service pack in order to make themselves feel good about themselves. As a Mac user, I was really excited about 10.6. Sure, no GUI redesign or anything major, but the addition of Grand Central Dispatch, OpenCL and nearly the entire operating system getting a 64 bit facelift all seemed like a pretty big deal to me.
On September 10, 2009 Apple released the source code to libdispatch under the Apache license. Today it's been announced that libdispatch has been ported to FreeBSD.
What's the fuss about Grand Central Dispatch? We're all running multi-processor or multi-core systems for the most part in 2009. For applications to run on more than one processor the burden falls on the developer to make the application multi-core aware. The application is responsible for scheduling its own threads. Otherwise, your operating system may be smart enough to spread the work load out over a couple of cores, but people like me who have an eight core system see their cores idle most of the time.
Grand Central Dispatch gives developers a library that schedules their application's threads across multiple cores without any more work on their part than adding some includes to their code. That is huge. Prior to Grand Central Dispatch only a handful of pro applications utilized multiple cores. Now Mac developers have a ready built library in their toolbox that will make their applications multi-core aware if they choose to include it in future builds of their apps.
Now FreeBSD has their own port of libdispatch. How long will it be before we have multi-core aware applications that currently only utilize one cpu or core? You can see the possibilities. Kudos to Apple for making their technology open source, and congratulations to FreeBSD for being the first server operating system that will be able to offer the advantages of this technology.
