A UnixWare That Can Run Linux Apps

rafa writes: "Caldera seems to have some interesting plans for UnixWare, the operating system they acquired from SCO. Using SCO's Linux Kernel Personality software, they can run Linux software on UnixWare. This might also be used in AIX 5L, according to Ransom Love." The Caldera folks have been talking about this for a long time; what remains to be seen is whether enough customers are interested in the hybrid commercial / Free software system to pay the premium for it. The article quotes Ransom Love as downplaying the touted features of 2.4, saying, "It will probably take another three years to build a [truly enterprise-ready] Linux kernel."

Comments

Re:Enterprise-ready

[The_Messenger]

What makes something a "real unix" anyway?

The Open Group, current owners of the UNIX trademark, manages a collection of standards and certification processes which a product must meet to be allowed to call itself "UNIX". For instance, here's a short blurb about the UNIX 98 standard:

The UNIX 98 Product Standard is a significantly enhanced version of the UNIX 95 Product Standard. The mandatory enhancements include (1) Threads interfaces, (2) Multibyte Support Extension (MSE), (3) Large File Support, (4) Dynamic Linking, (5) changes to remove hardware data-length dependencies or restrictions, and (6) Year 2000 changes. In addition the following optional enhancements are included: Software Administration facilities and a set of APIs for realtime support. This Product Standard includes the following mandatory Product Standards: Internationalized System Calls and Libraries Extended V2,Commands and Utilities V3, C Language, Transport Service (XTI) V2, Sockets V2 and Internationalized Terminal Interfaces. In addition, it may also conform to the Software Administration Product Standard.

Thus, real UNIX systems have much commonality, despite their individual quirks and differences in implementation. The propagation of open standards and a UNIX "brand" which must conform to these standards makes everything easier, from porting software to system administration. AIX 4.3 is a very, very different system than say, Solaris 2.8, but because they are both UNIX products, you can be guaranteed of certain behaviors and the availability of certain interfaces, daemons, libraries, and whatnot. Vendors were willing to go through the licensing/OSF mess in the late 80s in order to make possible the Single UNIX Specification available today.

The fact that so many Linux users can remain so ignorant about the system which Linux ripped off is astounding.

--
Ellison: How are you gentlemen !! All your database are belong to us

Re:Enterprise-ready

[The_Messenger]

The fact that you even mention NT as an example of an "enterprise-ready" system shows that you have no idea what you're talking about. NT5 only runs on x86 hardware, which I don't acknowledge as a platform for doing anything but playing Quake 3 or running "myhomepage.com".

"Enterprise-ready" is an E10k with 64 CPUs, 64GB of RAM, a and multi-terabyte SAN. "Enterprise-ready" is an RS/6000 farm. And to me, "enterprise-ready" is real UNIX. Linux lacks scalablity[1] on non-trivial (read: non-x86) hardware and widespread commercial software support. And decent threads! (Ask anyone who's had to port large UNIX software packages to Linux.)

Another problem with Linux is that the historically best distributions (such as Debian) have no corporate accountability, while the commercially popular distributions (such as Red Hat) are buggy-as-hell and dumbed-down.

Don't get me wrong, I use and enjoy Linux... but I'm a UNIX guy at heart and it pains me to see companies such as SCO say that Linux is competitive with UNIX, which IMNSHO it is not. Real UNIX is not only guaranteed to work better than anything else on your vendor's non-trivial hardware, but it will also comply with a large number of open standards that Linux hasn't even approached yet. Each of our ten RS/6000 cages contains about $800,000 of hardware; the cost of UNIX is insignificant, and the advantages are innumerable. The only place for Linux in our datacenter is embedded in our routers.

Offtopic: While I am a UNIX zealot, I like much of RMS's philosophy and use a lot of GNU software. In fact, I refer to my UNIX boxes as "GNU/SunOS": SunOS/Solaris with a full GNU development suite. Incredibly slick. Free Software rules, Open Source drools.

Oh well, no one on this site listens anyway...

[1] And on x86, it only scales well to 4 CPUs, but anyone who is going to waste their money on a (NUM_OF_CPU >= 8) x86 box deserves what he gets.

--
Ellison: How are you gentlemen !! All your database are belong to us

Re:3 years?

[doctor_oktagon]

Wow. with the number of businesses already using Linux, that's a rather interesting statement. (3 years for an enterprise-ready kernel)

An enterprise-ready kernel implies one suitable for running banking systems & very large database systems on. It would also imply a featureset much like Digital Tru64 or Solaris, with failover clustering etc.

With the best will in the world, I'm not sure Linux is currently at this stage, and I do not think it will be for a few years either.

Many businesses deloying Linux as web servers, firewalls, or file servers does not make Linux an enterprise-class platform.

Caldera

[The Deep Blue Funk]

I've tried their most recent release and was extremely impressed with it. It is without a doubt the most polished and professional commercial Linux distribution out there. It seems they have zero hacker credibility, but on the other hand I'm starting to think that maybe that's not necessarily a bad thing :) ('the hacker community', a la ESR's 'tribe' *blech* has gone way downhill in recent years, if it ever really existed as a cohesive group to begin with, being ever more dominated by the script kiddie/perpetually-enraged-teenage-Slashbot/bearde d-middle-aged-zealot-living-in-mom's-basement/just -plain-rude-and-annoying-person consituencies).

Installing it and administering it, you really get the feeling that a whole bunch of people were paid a whole bunch of money to spend months and months going over every inch of it, dotting every 'i' and crossing every 't', making sure everything worked together properly and that everything was consistent and uniform and complied with their policies on how things should be laid out. With Redhat, there's always the feeling that it's just a bunch of stuff that they threw together and stuck on a CD.

I use Debian but I would not hesitate to recommend Caldera to someone who wanted to deploy Linux in a business environment (or just for personal use). It's too bad that they aren't more popular than they are (anyone know the market share percentages for the various distros? Not that it matters, it'd just be interesting to see the figures).