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IBM Kills project Monterey
I just got this news - IBM is killing project Monterey. Full story can be found on this page at ZDNET (Smart Partner). This is a bit surprising (if I may call it like this).
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As for using the Linux kernel, IBM will be using the Linux kernel from top to bottom across all major product lines. IBM views Linux as the key strategic operating systems technology for its future.
... and another one bites the dust.
This is great news. If you read the article you can see that Linux and AIX are the cornerstones of the new IBM. The article says that it is IBM's intention to run Linux everywhere, from mainframes, to minis, to workstations, to PDAs. AIX RL 5.1 will be a version of AIX morphed with Linux.
Good work, IBM.
Going from a 32 bit OS to a 64bit OS means that all the address pointers in (mumble) million lines of C are converted from 4 byte (32 bit) to 8 byte (64 bit). Then you debug for around 2 lifetimes as indexing breaks all over. If you only have 32bit address capability, maximum addressable memory is 4GB (assuming byte addressability) which is a bit of a squeeze these days for Unix big iron so the whole pack of big Unix vendors are going over to 64bit, each in their own way. This is a horrible oversimplification, but if a processor such as Itanium has 64bit address/ALU registers (and this is what is usually meant by 64bit cpu, not bus width a la games consoles) you need to feed it 64bit address pointers. Some cpu architectures can adapt and use both 32/64, some just went 64 bit as a big bang conversion. With regard to Monterey, the desktop/small server has pretty much fallen to Linux in the Unix variant stakes and SCO have decided they have a better business elsewhere. IBM bought Sequent with it's 4-64 procs IA-32 Xeon Enterprise servers (incidentally a 32 bit CPU hacked to 36bits to extend the address space from a 32bit limit of 4GBytes to a 36bit limit of 64GBytes) From an IBM perspective, Monterey has succeeded. As noted in the article they will have a single source base OS that will compile to Power & Intel architectures + they are going for Linux compatibility as far as is sensible. IBM is using the technologies aquired from Sequent to build in NUMA capabilities, again in the article. With the best will in the world, a slick NUMA aware OS is not a minor variation to malloc and it doesn't appear that the Linux community are currently prepared to drop the plan and work on NUMA, 64 processor DSM (distributed shared memory systems) nor to tune Linux IO for multipath fibre IO that can sustain in excess of 3GBytes/second to disk, as Dynix can today. This is not a criticism, just a note that different priorities exist today. In 5 years, who knows. In the mean time, if/when AIX 5 pulls off Linux compatibility it may be binary compatibility for an IA64 server and source for a PowerPC. Seems to win all round for IBM. As for the name, IBM seems to believe that AIX is doing quite well in the market place, so deciding to call the PowerPC/IA64 Unix AIX 5 makes at least as much sense as throwing away all the pre-printed ball point pens and ordering a batch with Monterey (or something else on). Cheers, Crash
I beg to differ, sir..
Monterey was a co-operative porject of IBM, SCO, and sequent..
Now - all the monterey project goes to the next version of AIX..
So where do you see the Monterey project alive?
Hetz (Heunique)
I think you are wrong about WinNT 64 being "nowhere in sight." I saw it running in July at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference. It may not be ready for release, but it looked like it was at least beta quality. They should have no problem getting it released by the time Itanium ships.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, their other big cash cow, MS Office, is also soon to become a commodity. It might take a few years, but Linux and the Gnome Foundation are looking to cut off Microsoft's air supply completely. A Free, cross-platform, component-based, office suite is soon going to be available, and Microsoft is going to suffer. The fact that Microsoft has become addicted to astronomical profit margins and a constant increase in their stock price will only exacerbate the problem. They can't let go of either Windows or MS Office (because it would affect their revenue too much in the short term), and yet they aren't going to be able to compete with capable free software products forever (especially at their current price structure).
In the end it is going to be practically impossible to make money selling commodity software. But that's OK, software will still get written, it simply will be written by hardware or service based "solution providers."
IIRC, the i860 and i960 have done ok. Since they were RISC chips from Intel that weren't x86 compatible no one as far as I know used them as a main CPU. They were mainly used as co-processors or embedded cpus. SGI had a high end graphics board that used 12 i860s for doing the 3D transformations. Whether they still use them or not, I don't know.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Possibly the editors are aiming for maximum bottom-feeder no-think-just-post reactions (more comments, more banner views, yes?). The title you gave your submission just didn't have that. "IBM Kills Monterey" seemingly does.
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"Where, where is the town? Now, it's nothing but flowers!"
WinNT64 isn't "nowhere in sight." It runs, albeit slowly and really flaky. Hopefully Linux runs better than it (no experience there) but with Itanium getting closer to shipping, the landscape is looking pretty bare for operating systems.
By killing Montery, IBM has dropped a huge bomb on Intel and it's Itanium. With WinNT 64 being nowhere in sight, and other pro UNIXs being quite far off, the death of Montery hits Intel really hard, since that means the only OS that will run on it in the near future will be Linux.
:-)
Monterey died with the SCO sale, I suspect. There's been much hype, but I haven't read of anyone seeing a preview release. Oh well! I guess that's vaporware!
Linux will run on Itanium, and 64 bit to boot. Though I bet with a bunch of bugs. For example, Alphalinux is just a mess on SMP EV6 systems. I've seen it crash horribly on 4 CPU ES40s while performing NFS ops; looks like some sort of cross CPU spin lock contention which leads to deadlock. Yuk. But I bet it'll be fine on single CPU Itanium systems. And Linux is ubiquitous, which even at hype Monterey lacked. Plus, I suspect that between 2.4 and 2.6 we'll get the enterprise features we expect from commercial UNIX running properly on Linux; I want: decent NFS support, a functional automounter, pervasive threading throughout common system libraries and applications, a display server which supports antialiasing (actually a better display model would help -- how about "display postscript"?), and a logical volume manager... that would help.
You could probably look forward to NetBSD/OpenBSD porting to Itanium soon after release. And after that expect Sun to chime in with Solaris. But, like Solaris/Intel, I'm sure it will be a pale imitation.
http://www.ibm.com/servers/monterey/overview/
The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
Yup, that's true. The popular jab at the time was that OSF really stood for "Oppose Sun Forever."
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from project to project 'cause Big Blue really *enjoyed* canning projects!
Hey, at least Chairman Lou killed our project in a keynote!
InfoSage was pretty solid for the time, though definitely overpriced for the market...
Your Working Boy,
SCO had a lot of VAR contacts. VAR is a big part of Caldera's strategy.
:-)
Note that with all of the bad blood SCO had in the Linux community there is no way that SCO could push Linux to that channel. Caldera can.
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
You mean SCO 'owns a controlling interest' in The Open Group? I'd be astonished if this were true - the Open Group is an industry consortium, and no single vendor would be allowed to 'own' it, let alone dominate it.
The Open Group owns the Unix brandname, i.e. if you pass its conformance tests you get to call your product Unix.
By all means get pedantic, but get accurate as well :)
* S/390 = System/390 = the hardware architecture for current mainframes
* LPAR = hardware partitioning for S/390, can run multiple OSs within these partitions rather as with VM/390.
* OS/390 = Operating System/390 = the OS formerly known as MVS, runs most mainframe sites. Interestingly, it has a complete Unix API built in (not a separate mode), albeit in EBCDIC not ASCII.
* VM/390 = Virtual Machine/390 = the virtual machine hypervisor that can run many different OSs at once, including OS/390, CMS (single user OS, runs in a whole VM dedicated to one user, quite nice to use), and of coures Linux.
OK, that's enough pedantry... I'm not a real mainframe person, I just used to run Unix on an Amdahl mainframe once.
I thought this was OSF/1 based? At one time DEC called it DEC OSF/1 I think. The earlier DEC Ultrix was BSD based, though.
> Digital/Tru64 unix remains the only commercial unix that is largely based on the BSD code.
:)
I'm guessing BSDi is also based on BSD too
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Wouldn't this be a logical thing since SCO is now owned by Caldera? Why would caldera continue to fund the further development of another UNIX variant, along with IBM who is fully behind Linux now too? It would just be rather odd that two Linux centric companies would together develop another OS to compete with themselves...
This is doubly a good thing for Linux.
A) Its one less competitor, and it looks like IBM will be pushing Linux (and AIX) instead.
B) Depending on how the implemetations of Trillian and the Linux on 64 bit AMD go, you may be able to very easily run code on either version of Linux, whereas Monterey would lock you into using Intel hardware.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
No, it should really read: IBM kills Dynix. IBM owns Sequent (them of the Dynix OS) and has been selling it pretty agressively as an enterprise platform (and it is a good one too). Well, Sequent has always used x86 processors --Monterey was supposed to unite AIX and Dynix, breathing life into the Sequent line post-IA64.
So basically they're killing Dynix (it was supposed to die) and substiting it with AIX RL (Linux). I.e. Linux is getting its first, official mainframe/micro line --yeah you can run it on RS/6000s, but you can also run plain AIX. In a coupla years you will *only* be able to run AIX RL on IA-64 Sequents...
engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.
Without an enterprise level OS (or at least one that traditional IT techs PERCIEVE
Umm... HPUX.
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Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
I wonder how much Caldera's purchase of SCO had to do with this..
Remember, this was a joint venture with SCO.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
umm.. it is actually good. Monterey was an effort to create a unified(sco, ibm,...) unix platform(like we need one more) that would run on most popular server platforms(IA-32, IA-64 and Power). Now that they have linux(that already runs on these platforms) this is not necessary and the resources devoted to creating something that users would have to pay big bucks for can be directed to something more useful(such as linux development). There would have been serious overlap with Project Monterey and linux anyway so why compete against a huge open source movement when you can join it.
The goal of project monterey was to create a stable enterprise unix for an intel platform. This was accomplished in AIX for the IA-64 platform. I submitted this story a couple days ago as well
2000-08-14 16:42:51 AIX 5L for IA-64 (articles,ibm) (rejected)
but for some reason it got rejected...
Point well-made. However, if we want to get really pedantic, the system OS/390 is either an operating system or a platform, and VM is a meta-operating system (or operating sytem) that runs on system OS/390 and Linux runs under VM. :-) Gosh, these IBM folx are strange, but they do good stuff sometimes.
+++
+++
NO CARRIER
The fact that Sun is destroying IBM in the unix market has little to do with technical issues - the Sparc architecture itself is far behind. Its marketing pure and simple. Sun has a coherent end-to-end marketing story - Solaris on Sun Sparc hardware, IBM doesn't - they're beholden to too many platforms.
Expect each vendor in this group crowd to dump its proprietary unix. HP certainly will if it wants to revice its flagging unix-systems division - which in this quarter was only a fraction of HP's reported earnings. SGI pretty much already has adopted linux full-fledged (not sure if this, or SGI, even really matters), and IBM looks like they are on their way.
They really don't have a choice - Sun is as much of a threat to these vendors now as MS, and McNealy is going to be as much as a cut-throat as Gates about killing off the competition (who I garner he never really cared for anyway).
Fragmentation-for-features was only ever worthwhile when unix was being marketed strictly to brainy IT folks buying high-end equipment only. Now its entering the mainstream and marketing matters. The fragmented approach simply doesn't jive when you are trying to tell a coherent marketing story.
When do this strategy emerge? Every indication is that Sun is backing Solaris on Sparc as their single unified strategy.
As for Compaq, their only hope now is large corporate contracts. Dell has largely pushed them out of the direct/consumer market, and their recent stumbles have given consumers the impression that they are no longer a leader despite their size. As you know, the company has also had some extremely questionable financials in the last two years.
Take a look at Sun's market share and their stock price. They aren't too worried about linux just yet. In fact, its IBM who should be worried about Sun virtually locking up the midrange like Microsoft has the low end.
IBM killed it for the reason that it was too expensive to develop, they were the only ppl to support it, and Linux was more cross compatible. However, i wouldn't be suprised if they created their own linux distro instead, that would be packaged with their stuff. Somehow I don't think IBM will put up with having to use 'other people's operating systems'.
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Crudely Drawn Games
You've missed my point completely, well done! When IBM comitted to Monterey Caldera wasn't in the picture, and IBM was only just starting to look at Linux. Now Caldera aren't going to be interested in continuing the project as they are a Linux company so IBM has lost it's partner. IBM are also heavily into Linux (including the Trillian project to port Linux to IA-64) so probably aren't much interested in it either.
Whaaat? MacOS and NeXTStep before it were totally BSD...right from the beginning. BSD through and through.
In fact...Steve Jobs, the great visionary, "Edison of our times", _INVENTED_ BSD...HE CAME UP WITH THE WHOLE IDEA!!! IT WAS HIS _GENIUS_!!!
...and you WinTel bozos STOLE IT! Just like you STOLE everything else from Apple!
Curse you!
Merge the AIX and GNU toolchains; take the best of each. GPL the stuff that came from the AIX source. Then optimize the AIX kernel for all that super high-end hardware, and use Linux for the lower-end boxen. The result: one operating system, with a choice of two kernels, each optimized for different hardware.
The reason it might not make sense to simply tune Linux up to the high end hardware is that Linux could end up like Solaris: a real performer on computers with many CPU's, but at the expense of having so much SMP overhead that it runs slow on computers with one or few processors. For Linux, which is currently a Microsoft-killer on commodity single-x86 boxen, this would be a very bad thing!
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Project monterey was just a project to get AIX running on an intel architecture.
This project was a success, so now they will be integrating AIX and Linux. The AIX libraries and so forth will be compatible with the linux libraries, etc. This will allow programs that were written for linux to compile on AIX with little or no modification. This is a great thing for linux, and shows that big blue is standing behind linux.
Now, if we can just get them to support a few more distros....
By killing Montery, IBM has dropped a huge bomb on Intel and it's Itanium. With WinNT 64 being nowhere in sight, and other pro UNIXs being quite far off, the death of Montery hits Intel really hard, since that means the only OS that will run on it in the near future will be Linux. Now, while Linux will probably handle the lower-midrange end of the market pretty well, Solaris it ain't. Without an enterprise level OS (or at least one that traditional IT techs PERCIEVE as enterprise level) to go along with it's enterprise level CPU, Intel is going to hit up against quite a barrier with it's already screwy Itanium project.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
The Unix (TM) brand name
A nice, tree hugging logo
Title for Tom Cruise's next movie: "MI3: The Santa Cruz Operation"
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
It won't help Caldera
I was wondering when this would happen. We're just seeing the beginning of Linux displacing proprietary OS's. As a consultant friend of mine predicted 5 years ago, the commercial Unicies simply won't be able to keep up with the innovation and "heart and mind" support of a world wide effort.
Note to Microsoft: We're stealing a page out of your playbook. The software doesn't have to be good to be successful, it just has to be popular. We're doing one better though, we're also making good software in a good way and we've got the support of the people you tried to ignore. The CIO's are the wrong people to be pandering to!
Monterey was a good idea and it'll be even better when folded into Linux. Soon I predict that all of the best parts of all the commercial Unicies will be folded into Linux...
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Quantum Linux Laboratories - Accelerating Business with Linux
* Education
* Integration
* Support
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
Slashdot has had a few stories about it, notably one here
siri
Monterey was a consortium of IBM, SCO, NUMA-Q, and Intel to deliver an enterprise-grade unix for Itanium( aka, IA-64, Mercred).
An interesting bit was the cc:NUMA architecture for high end clustering. I wonder what will become of it?
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
Honestly, is there anything left of SCO worth Caldera shelling out the money it paid?
"My head hurts, My feet stink, and I dont love Jesus." -Jimmy Buffett
Like it or not, a lot of people are lining up behind Itanium and Intel is still the unquestioned emperor of the microprocessor market. They'll do fine without Monterey.
Monterey is very much alive. The only thing that is going on is that the RELEASE name is changing from Monterey/64 (on IA64) to AIX 5.0 (or AIX-L, with the "L" standing for the ability to run Linux IA64 binaries). SCO will probably ship "AIX 5" for IA64. It is NOT the case that IBM is going to be using the Linux kernel. One thing that was supposed to happen that might get dropped is support for UnixWare IA32 binaries on IA64.
This is not actually that surprising. IBM has a stated goal of making linux run on every piece of hardware and every platform they sell, from the top of the line (OS390) to the bottom (intel-based netfinity line, I guess).
So there are two things going on here: 1) IBM has their own version of Unix that's quite good but not doing very well in the marketplace. 2) IBM has decided that Linux is the way to unseat Sun's dominance of the midrange server market.
Given those two facts, supporting yet a different version of Unix designed primarily for the Itanium platform (regardless of what they say about also running on the Power chip) doesn't make any sense. Even IBM has limited resources.
Bullshit. The purpose of OSF was to unify against the looming threat of SunOS/AT&T SysV integration - it would do excatly the opposite of protecting "its members' respective proprietary OSes." Sun eventually parted ways with AT&T, and OSF withered. DEC was the only company to actually release OSF for its hardware. IBM and HP eventually went with a SysV strategy anyway; Digital/Tru64 unix remains the only commercial unix that is largely based on the BSD code.
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http://gammatron.weblogger.com
Monterey was the joint effort of IBM, SCO, and two others to port a high-end, enterprise class unix to Itanium (IA-64). The excitement driving the buzz was that Monterey looked like the migration path for AIX.
Looks like Linux inherits all that buzz.
GO TRILLIAN
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
I amazed that they even ever saw SCO as a viable partner - the corpse of SCO has been floating from door to door looking for some poor sucker to take it in and break it down for spare parts. Caldera finally was suckered. Ransom Love looked quite clueless telling the audience in San Jose that Linux alone couldn't do it - that somehow SCO's dead product line was needed to complete its promise to customers. What hooey. SCO will be like WordPerfect, a forgotten power that drifts from buyer to buyer. Caldera needs to realize that customers want to hear a coherent marketing story - having a linux company come out and tell people that linux is inadequate is not what I would call a compelling marketing story. This doesn't surprise me one bit - Caldera has never known one thing about marketing their own product (the "Business Linux"???? what the hell is that????).
Anyway, back to IBM. Its nice to see finally that the potential market for AIX on IA64 is likely too small to address as a strategic issue. Customers are tired of parallel product lines that somehow address high-end, midrange, low-end, in some bizarre drivel that never makes any sense. Look at Compaq's worthless unix marketing plan regarding Tru64 and Linux.
IBMs major problem has always been that it considers itself too big to commit to any one platform. This is why still to this day IBM has marketing issues. Look at Sun - they have one product line and one OS - a Sun customer always knows what end is up with that company and the Sun commitment is always coherent. This is why Sun is going to continue being the number one unix vendor, for better or for worse, even though IBM's product lineup is likely superior (just impossible to see in continuity).