Lamar Owen <lamar.owen@wgcr.org> wrote:
> Tell me this -- if Red Hat is using the same kernel as Debian,
Technically speaking, this is a false premise. Just about every
distributions ships with kernels that are modified to some degree (e.g.
extra drivers, backported drivers). I know Red Hat does; I know Debian does
as well.
> how can Debian do a better job on performance, all daemons being equal?
Theoretically speaking, for instance by careful optimisation (e.g.
processor-variant-specific builds of libraries and daemons).
> Same compiler
Not always, remember http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-2.96.html? (An unfortunate
incident I admit; I certainly appreciate Cygnus / Red Hat's significant
contributions to the development of gcc, glibc and binutils)
> -- same kernel -- same processor -- different packagers. Why would Debian
> be better in that circumstance?
I don't expect significant performance differences between Red Hat and
Debian either way.
The differences that exist are primarily the result of different development
models, Red Hat's one being one with a fairly small central core maintained
by employees of a company and augmented by a large collection of contributed
packages of varying quality, and Debian's one of a large set of packages
maintained by a large group of volunteers and held together through an
explicit policy (http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/) with virtually no
externally contributed packages.
Ray
--
AJ: Geeez, Erwin. He wasn't even ARMED.
Erwin: I don't care. I have lots of ammo and he was wearing a TIE.
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20010209
