Comment by throwaway1194 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway1194 | Hacker News Reader

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Far from baseless speculation, there are many things that Linux does just _right_ compared to anything else, unfortunately my time is limited to list all of them here.

I will just say that one big advantage of Linux compared to other kernels is the fact that the same Linux kernel that your average Joe is running on their own machine, is the same kernel that CERN is running in their experiments.

Improvements to any area of the kernel get upstreamed and sometimes those affect (and benefit) various setups other than the intended machine, this is mainly due to the nature of open source and shared codebase, Linus himself explains it here:

https://youtu.be/MShbP3OpASA?t=1335

https://youtu.be/MShbP3OpASA?t=2280

I think this is more than what any company could ever dream of achieving, they might just lack the resources to do it.

I wanna preface by saying I'm a huge linux fan, but a couple things:

1. I'm not sure what kernel optimizations for CERN's x86 machine have to do with ARM Apple Silicon. I get that in abstract improvements "could" trickle down from that but once again without any performance benchmarks that is the definition of speculation.

Yeah, improvements and bug fixes get upstreamed but not every algorithm is going to optimized for the architecture of Apple Silicon.

> I get that in abstract improvements "could" trickle down from that but once again without any performance benchmarks that is the definition of speculation.

Fair enough, I am not sure whether CPU schedulers are shared across architectures, I am also not aware of any recent benchmarks other than: https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m2-zen4-mobile

Where I was going with my original statement/post is that I wouldn't be surprised to see Linux doing better in some benchmarks due to improvements in the kernel, there has been many recent developments such as io_uring[0], MGLRU, etc. that could make a difference compared to other systems.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-IWMbJXoLM&t=1004s

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