Still worth avoiding having the HN thread be about whether OpenBSD is in general faster than Linux. This is a thing I've seen a bunch of times recently, where someone gives an attention-grabbing headline to a post that's actually about a narrower and more interesting technical topic, but then in the comments everyone ignores the content and argues about the headline.
As I understand it, OpenBSD is similar to Linux 2.2 architecturally in that there is a lock that prevents (most) kernel code from running on more than one (logical) CPU at once.
We do hear that some kernel system calls have moved out from behind the lock over time, but anything requiring core kernel functionality must wait until the kernel is released from all other CPUs.
The kernel may be faster in this exercise, but is potentially a constrained resource on a highly loaded system.
It was more that there were a couple of particularly frustrating recent examples that happened to come to my attention. Of course this has always been a problem.
