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SGI and SuSE Team Up on FailSafe for Linux
Syn Ack writes, "SGI and SuSE announced at CEBIT that they are going to team up to bring Iris FailSafe to Linux. Linus is quoted as saying that this is a "piece of the puzzle" that Linux is missing. Here is SGI's press release." The press release says FailSafe for Linux will be open source, but doesn't say under what license.
A staff member of the SuSE team told me that the source for IRIS FailSafe will be GPL'ed. And if you take a look at http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/odi-26.02.00-0 01/ you will notice that the c't magazine writes the same, so that this info has a high probability...
You found a sword: +4 damage, +5 moderator points
a) SGI can do nothing right: so I guess switching to Linux is wrong? Making a very high percentage of the machines on the Top500 list is wrong? Um, ok...
b) They have crappy unscalable hardware: So I guess Onyx II Infinite Reality Graphics are crappy? Hate to break it to you, but, while they may be a bit pricey, there ain't nothin' much faster. As for unscalable, 512 processors isn't scalable? Please. I run Irix on a machine with 512 processors and 196 gigs of RAM. Can Linux do that? Other than Cray, and Intel's one-off for ASCI, does anyone make anything bigger? Granted we (I work for SGI, in case you couldn't tell) are selling Cray, but the T3E has been sold in configurations of 1800 processors and the architecture scales even further. I think that qualifies as "scalable".
c) Inferior OS with no features Linux doesn't have: Pass me whatever *you're* smoking please. How about a journaling file system that is production ready? Scalable to 512 processors? ccNUMA support? Runs Alias|Wavefront applications that produce probably at least half the special effects you see on TV/movies? I'm sure there are more, but I don't feel like coming up with them. Now don't get me wrong - Linux is a great OS, but that doesn't mean that Linux lacks no feature found in Irix.
d) Public commercial company: RedHat. VA Reasearch. Need I go on?
e) Secret motives to steal the genious from Linux: And just how would we do that even if we wanted to??? All we would succeed in doing is getting everyone upset with us and ending up with a propietary version of Linux. Where, exactly, would that get us besides bankruptcy court? If it were up to us, we'd probably insert massive scalability features into Linux like, say, support for 512 processor SSI's. But, the Linux community would never accept those changes so we simply won't make them until the community will. Trust me, SGI is far more interested in playing by the rules than I'll bet most "Linux companies" out there.
If you want a company that keeps mumbling about contributions to Linux/Open Source and doesn't deliver, think of Sun, not SGI.
Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"