Software Drift

Abstract

Since the systems have a common parent, they probably work in the same technical domain, and therefore the features and fixes that are going to be added are probably similar. KV happens to have an example case at hand: two operating systems that diverged before they added SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) support. When an operating system adds SMP to an existing kernel, the first thing we think of is locks, those handy-dandy little performance killers that we've all been sprinkling around our code since the end of Dennard scaling.