Port 25 - Communications from the open source community at Microsoft

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1. NBA Basketball » Basketball Blogging and other thoughts… said:

   PingBack from http://nbabasketball.biz/basketball-blogging-and-other-thoughts/

   posted at 07:43PM 03/05/2007
2. fluke said:

   I image Project Gotham Racing on 80 cores would play/feel very similar to how it is on 3 cores.  Even if it allows dedicating 8 cores to XAudio so every speaker in a 7.1 surround system get a core, it won't matter because if the noise level going from Xbox to Xbox360 is any indication then noise cancelling headphones will be a popular accessory for the Xbox720 (and the solution in your blog seems a little over-board for a mere game system).

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   On a more serious note, this layout between cores doesn't seem that different a game running on a Sega Genesis or Sony PS2.  The majority of the game engine runs on a single processor which farms out some of it auxiliary functions to a side processor(s).  On the Sega Genesis the side processor was a Z80, on the PS2 it was the IOP and on the Xbox360 it is just something even "hotter."  So, when will we see games where the game engine spreads the physics across the available core?

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   From an interop stand point, Vista and DirectX 10 are neither interesting.  The information available online suggests that Microsoft has pushed the work to the user of acquiring and updating the ICD for getting OpenGL version 2.0 to work.  It terms of using a multi-platform 3D graphic API, Mac OS X provides out of the box much better performance and API version when compared to the default Vista offering of OpenGL 1.4 with degraded performance.

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   Anywho... can you someday write a blog entry on what life with drive letters was like?  So "We Have a Way Out" was a system that "scales" to only 26 mount points?  :)  Will they also be providing real symbolic links (short-cuts don't count since they aren't automatically dereferenced by open()), fsetuid/setgid bits, named pipes and unnamed files?

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   The lack of unnamed files is by far the most frustrating piece of dealing with Windows.  *nix systems allow a file that is in use to loose it's name and even allow the name to then be reused.  Anotherwords, you can delete a filename and replace the file even if the file is in use.  Windows will lock even the administrator from performing the same task declairing "file in use" as an acceptable excuse (it isn't even kind enough to tell what is using it).  To some extent, this creates a situation where Windows seems to be *protective* of keeping malware or other undesirable files.  And the issue still existed in Vista during beta testing.

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   Lastly, while some parts of this on-going Vista kernel walk-through is interesting, I personally would like to hear more about Singularity.  I have yet to hear anything about Vista that is as "Wow"-ing from a technical prospective as what Microsoft is accomplishing with Singularity and Bartok.

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   Thanks for this installment to your blog and I look forward to the blogs of substance!  :)

   posted at 06:56PM 03/08/2007
3. einhverfr said:

   First, if I may address one of Fluke's main criticisms of Windows-- the filesystem.  It would be a *tremendous* step forward for Windows to move to something like an Inode-based system and a VFS tree (instead of wondering "Was my document on drive S or drive T?"  Ok, that was an extreme example...).  It seems to me that the logical way to do this given the current directions of the industry would be to have a bottom half that would map block storage to a SCSI OSD interface, and then an upper half which handles naming.  This would also making support of OSD over something like iSCSI to be trivial.  In any case, VFS is not that hard to implement.

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   Also I would point out that the diagram, while instructive on the 3-core approach, also points out that the software isn't fully utilizing all three cores.  So while Fluke's criticisms hold here, I am not sure they are meaningful.  In fact it would suggest that 3 is the right number of cores for this particular game.

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   However, there is a interesting (and positive) story here that I would suggest is perhaps extremely under-reported.  This is the fact that the XBox 360 is largely a refreshing step back from Brian Kirshner's comments that we are all servents of the x86.  It is nice to see Microsoft once again embracing RISC :-).  Maybe soon we will be able to buy Windows Server Enterprise for the Power-6?

   posted at 03:04PM 03/17/2007