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To: Jason Thorpe <thorpej@nas.nasa.gov>
From: lm@neteng.engr.sgi.com (Larry McVoy)
cc: "David S. Miller" <davem@jenolan.rutgers.edu>, jkh@time.cdrom.com,
        dyson@freebsd.org, dennis@etinc.com, kpneal@pobox.com,
        hackers@freebsd.org, torvalds@cs.helsinki.fi, lm@relay.engr.SGI.COM,
        iain@sbs.de, sparclinux@vger.rutgers.edu
Subject: Re: TCP/IP bandwidth bragging 
Date: Mon, 02 Dec 1996 23:30:56 -0800
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David, please don't bait the FreeBSD folks.  They don't seem to want
your help and aren't interested in a friendly competition.  And while
you don't seem to see it, you are being pretty antagonistic.  You have
the same problem I do - you assume that people know you are a good guy 
with good intentions.  Not the case, most people assume people they 
haven't worked with are buttheads.  Oh, and "all government contracts"
do not spec lmbench, only a few important ones like Diamond & ASCI.

FreeBSD folks, please don't beat up David for optimizing for the I/O
paths tested by lmbench.  While I agree with the load vs no load points
raised, you are missing another one: smallness is goodness, and David
is almost always optimizing by making things smaller.  There are plenty
of people shoveling stuff into the kernel making it slower - David is
making it smaller & faster, let him be, it's useful.

I'll try and get the focus on stuff that is closer to the FreeBSD ideal
of under load metrics in lmbench 2.0. (real soon now).  You can help,
send in those specifications for what you want measured.

Oh, and one other thing, when David says "pinhead" it's a compliment.
It's what he calls Linus (and me when I don something useful).  I dunno
why, but there you have it.  David, this is a good example of how you
are perceived - people assumed you were insulting them and you weren't.
But reading "pinhead" at face value, it is sort of hard to take it as
a compliment.  I certanly wouldn't unless I knew you.

--lm

Just say: not wanting to have any more flame wars in my mailbox...