TestMac.net has published a quick look at Mac OS X Snow Leopard. “The biggest changes are under the hood. Snow Leopard is fast. Very fast. Like, surprisingly fast. From boot times to general application usage, Snow Leopard was noticeably quicker then Leopard when using the same system. Apple and 3rd party applications alike, they all launched faster and performed smoother. I’m sure this can be attributed to the new 64-bit architecture, but its amazing how much of a difference it really is.” Screenshots included.
Haven’t heard this one before.
Edited 2008-06-26 23:22 UTC
(in the short time i’ve been here i’ve found that staying out of apple/kde conversations is a good idea. my knowledge is debian/windows so it’s best left to people who know more than me.)
as far as 10.6 goes it looks like there has been a large amount of optimisation which is something every OS needs as often as possible.
for me footprint is a big issue, leaner code means less things to break and getting almost 1Gb off an install is a big leap. i don’t buy hardware to help run bloat so good work apple devs on slimming things up.
I’m wondering whether the space saved is due to the removal of bitmap images which the used to bundle. IIRC, the used to bundle something like 4 difference sized bitmaps – I wonder whether this has been replaced with SVG instead which would negate the need to for it.
It’ll also be interesting to see what role the LLVM project has done in terms of optimisation versus bloat. I remember when using gcc, that was one of the things which had to be balanced; you could heavily optimise something, but then have any possible gain destroyed by the fact that the binary was bloated.
I do remember, however, an article on slimming down binaries; there was one demonstrating how much bloat there is, for example, in a simple ‘hello world’ binary. The article was over several pages, and they removed a whole laundry list of things compiled into it which the application didn’t strictly need to function. After removing all the bloat, it was over half the size.
It’ll be interesting to find out when Arstechnica does its usual indepth analysis of Snow Leopard.
MS doing absolute min?
I think you see only what you want to see.
For example, have you tried Vista’s speech and handwriting recognition features? Man, those simply rock. What OSX (or Linux) offers there is a joke compared to Vista, seriously.
Or.. transactions under NTFS (so that Windows Update can now guarantee that updates are installed properly or rollback all changes if one fails, for example)? That too is absolute minimum?
Sure, there are many other things where Windows still lacks, etc, etc.
Edited 2008-06-27 01:57 UTC
Do you know what bare minimum means. If the market says, “this is what everyone else includes” or “this is what the market expects”, doing the bare minimum is only just meeting it, but never over delivering.
Who uses them? I certainly don’t! it certainly doesn’t deliver me anything potentially useful. How many people do I see using these features? bugger all. No use poodle faking about features no one outside of the niche you occupy actually cares about.
Which is Microsofts work around for their stupid idea of ‘locking files’. Who ever thought of the idea of ‘locking files’ needs to be given a public flogging for the ten plus years of borked installations, corrupt updates and numerous bits of garbage being left behind after running an uninstaller.
Edited 2008-06-27 02:27 UTC
kaiwai, its obvious you are bias against microsoft and nobody can say anything that will change your mind or agree with anything positive about microsoft ..like what somebody else said, you only see what you want to see .. just curious, do you like anything microsoft?
if they put their best in their products, would you be proud of them or complain that they are strengthening their position in whatever market they put their best in?
Who uses them?
Obviously you don’t.
Is that an excuse for such a poor job Apple did there or is it just that you’re like most other Mac users – you know, you’re at the very center of the universe: if you don’t need it, nobody else does?
Which is Microsofts work around for their stupid idea of ‘locking files’.
Oh yeah? And what if system simply powers down while it is halfway done?
Transactions are there to guarantee atomicity of the operation. That’s why most databases have those since.. well, like forever. Now, NTFS supports them too. Good thing.
And then you ask why people mod you down.
I certainly don’t! it certainly doesn’t deliver me anything potentially useful.
Microsoft is, with its excellent speech recognition, addressing needs of a minority group(s) too and kudos to them not only for doing it, but for doing it that good.
You, kaiwai, of all people, should know better.
I can’t say that I’ve used OS X’ handwriting recognition, but I have used their voice recognition. My experience is limited to my own voice (native english speaker; very little regional accent), but I can’t imagine it working any better. There’s no training, but I’ve never had it misunderstand. Moreover, the fact that you can simply drop a script into a folder and when you say the script’s name is really very functional. You have commands that only apply to a particular app, make a folder with that name and put your commands/macros/whatever there. The only thing it’s missing is dictation (which you can buy).
Vista’s works much differently, and while it also works well, with my voice at least, it make quite a few mistakes. And it’s not nearly as easy to customize as OS X.
That said, it’s a silly thing to harp on. Few people use either handwriting recognition or voice recognition. The former isn’t used much since most people don’t have the hardware for it and many find the keyboard faster and easier. The latter most people don’t use because if you have other people around you they find your talking to the computer annoying (try it in a cubicle farm or the family room at home and see how popular it is).
I wonder if they simply imported a lot of the changes from freebsd 7, or if that is even possible now with their darwin kernel?
Darwin has another kernel, xnu, which is quite different. MacOS X isn’t FreeBSD + stuff, it’s Darwin + stuff, and my guess is that even though they use some stuff from FreeBSD it’s not really something that would give such a speed-up.
My guess is that the speed comes from the jump to 64-bit (more registers etc) and optimizations. Which is great news indeed. What I do wonder is if they are using some cool SSE(1-4) voodoo as well:) Nice not having to focus on old CPUs
If you want to know about how OS X is really constructed, there is a an *awesome* video recording from the 24C3 hacker meeting. You can find it under:
http://chaosradio.ccc.de/24c3_m4v_2303.html
IIRC XNU even stands for Xnu is Not Unix.
Most of OSX’s FreeBSD bits are userland, not kernel.
well yes but code from freebsd still is an important part of the kernel. if i remember correctly, originally a big part of the freebsd kernel was bolted on top of mach and combined with the driver subsystem io-kit. that’s why the bad multithreading support of bsd affected xnu too. most programms don’t call mach directly but through bsd-threads.
but i have no idea how much room for improvement is left and if the improvements of freebsd 7 are of any use for xnu. if they happened in a part of the kernel covered by mach, they aren’t. but i think that the bsd-part also provided the posix threading model and that has been improved in freebsd 7. apple syncronised the bsd-part of xnu with freebsd 5 in darwin 7 (osx 10.3).
ps:
http://www.osnews.com/thread?283223
pss: http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/osx/arch_xnu.html
Edited 2008-06-27 16:34 UTC
There are a number of operating systems that offer 32bit and 64bit versions: XP, Linux, etc.
So as OSX makes the transition and speeds up; it leaves the question – does OSX speed up by a greater or lesser factor compared to other operating systems doing the same transition?
There is room for a good article on this: pinning down the practical performance enhancement of moving from 32bit to 64bit operating systems; and suggesting which O/S are on the curve and which are behind it.
Leopard (10.5) already supports 64 bit programs. I suspect the article is confused, perhaps by rumors that Snow Leopard was only to run on 64 bit processors. The main processing advances in Snow Leopard are for additional multiple core performance for applications (Grand Central), and offloading some mathematical operations onto GPUs (OpenCL).
Tests I’ve seen all conclude that MacOS is completely focused on the desktop experience, server benchmarks are terrible. Since they have (way overpriced) rack servers, I wonder if they address this at least a little bit.
if the code from freebsd 5 is to blame and they switch to freebsd 7, that might change the picture quite dramatically:
http://people.freebsd.org/%7Ekris/scaling/mysql-freebsd.png
http://people.freebsd.org/%7Ekris/scaling/os-mysql.png