Friday 21 March, 2008

Netware Vs(And) Linux

'm a Novell guy. From the title of this post and 'm being a Novell guy, you might have guessed that I enjoyed both the flavors. In this post, I will just try to put some ideas/points that I know about them.
For people new to Netware, here is brief description on it.
Netware - its full name is Novell Netware. It is:
- Non preemptive
- Can be loaded on a very low end machine
- Callback functions that need to be executed will be added to Worker Threads which are maintained by OS
- Processor will be allocated to worker threads to execute the work
Guyz, please correct if any mistakes.
And regarding linux, every one knows. It is preemptive and uses LRU to allocate processor to jobs.
Now, we need to decide when a particular OS can be selected.
As Netware is non preemptive, processor will be executing your work until you block yourself for some input or network packets or yield yourself to release the processor. So, it will be the best to use for servers as the processor will be executing your work and you can yield whenever you want. Also, because of this, we can overcome the unnecessary overhead of waiting to acquire semaphores to enter critical sections. As the Netware can be loaded on very low end machines, even, a low end machine can work as servers where as in the other OS case, you can't think of even loading it.
For general purpose computers, linux will be the best as the response of the programs will be good. And, for servers, if high end machines can be used which is the usual case, linux works great than Netware. If your machine is multi processor and core ones, we need to acquire semaphores to enter critical sections even in Netware. So, once you move to high end machines with multi processor and core ones, Linux should do better than Netware.
Netware can be used as clusters on low end machines as servers, so that, this cluster can be used in fault tolerance, load balancing etc. So, this can be used in distributed systems where the things are duplicated, fault tolerance is needed. So, can be used in distributed file systems like GFS.
Please correct if any mistakes.
What the other design related points in selecting OS?

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