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Comment by eptcyka | Hacker News Reader

It has very little to do with what kind of syscalls (I/O or other kinds) and all to do with how many syscalls a given application makes per given time period. Compute bound applications are already avoiding syscalls in their hotter parts. This will mostly be a blow to databases, caching servers and other such I/O limited applications.

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In other words, don't worry - pretty much all the key performance bottlenecks most of us deal with at work will be getting tighter, but at least our video games will still run OK.

Well, sounds like that time when there is no water left but there are still beers in the fridge.

At least we can play our sorrows away.

Right now I am just hoping that it wont add significant overhead to OpenGL. My application already has a bottleneck on changing OpenGL states and issuing render commands and I have no idea how much of that time is spend making syscalls.

OpenGL implementations shouldn't be effected by syscall overhead. Historically it's been DirectX that had a syscall per draw call, but I believe both now just write the command to GPU RAM directly.

That's at least somewhat encouraging. Nevertheless, it sounds rather like the old, "Yes, but will it run Crysis?" question will perhaps have renewed relevance.

That’s terrible - these are precisely the sort of customers who will suddenly get hit with a performance hit that will negatively impact their operations!

This sounds like it’s positively evil for outfits that rely heavily on virtualisation also.

Would it be fair to say that this might cause acceptation in the shift from on prem to the public cloud, where there are performance guarantees?

There aren't really performance guarantees for CPU and the ones that are there won't help here. When this patch is released big providers will have the same hardware as before and sell it in the same way - but the OS and userspace will just be slower for some use patterns.

There isn't a guarantee that will compensate for that any more than if you updated some piece of your software infrastructure to a new version that just got slower.

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