Foo_ (foo@nomail.com) on 7/26/07 wrote:
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>Paul (no@thanks.com) on 7/25/07 wrote:
>---------------------------
>>Given that stuff that was regarded as "Enterprise" a few years ago such as decent
>>SMP scaling (and SMP support at all), >1GB memory support on x86 and even NUMA.
>>Is now "Desktop" I would say the position of having a keeping a single kernel for
>>everything (with a few configurable options) rather than trying to tweak for a particular
>>segment as Con was trying to do has been entirely vindicated.
>
>Uh, the specificity of desktop vs. "enterprise" is not in the hardware but in the
>usage model. You can use the same hardware as both desktop and "enterprise", use cases will still be varying different.
>(see Linus' response in this thread, and also Con's interview as linked to in the first post)
>

According to my understanding, Paul meant to say that with good scalable SMP support when you have 4 cores (often even 2 cores) the CPU scheduling algorithm have negligible effect on desktop responsiveness.
Same with memory - when an average desktop has >1GB in place kernel developers would rather not spend their precious time fine-tuning swapping vs disk cache.

It seems to me that when mighty 4-core, 2GB desktop feels slow in most cases you want to blame either slow disk or crappy application design rather than "kernel overtuned for enterprise".