"In my October 29, 2001, Byte.com column I described
the new VM written by kernel hacker Andrea Arcangeli. In that
article, I promised I would come back to my FreeBSD versus Linux
comparison that I ran in my February 2001 column. Many people say
FreeBSD has a very good virtual memory manager. As it turns out, I
pretty much proved them right in that article.
Now, with the new VM engine in Linux as of 2.4.10, things might
look different, so I prepared a new test environment for the
benchmark.
I would like to point out that my benchmarks are neither
scientific nor formal. Nor do I claim to be an expert in
benchmarking. I just run programs we all use in our daily routine
repeatedly against both operating systems, then calculate the
simple average. Therefore, these benchmarks are not to be taken as
a full-out measure of things, but rather as an indication of how we
have progressed in the last eight to nine months and to determine
whether the new Linux VM performs better against FreeBSD than Linux
2.4.0 did."
