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Caldera's Almost-Linux Skips The Linux Kernel

Cassivs points to this UnixReview article, which says "Caldera has released Open UNIX 8, which includes a complete GNU/Linux distribution, except that it runs on the SVR5 kernel, acquired from SCO. It uses the same packages as Caldera's OpenLinux 3.1. It should scale much better, and provides a commercial UNIX kernel with the ability to natively develop GNU/Linux applications." It sounds like a non-Linux kernel has advantages on certain hardware, even running exactly the same software otherwise -- I wonder how long that will be true. Caldera has talked about this product, with it's Linux Kernel Personality, for a long time, and this is an informative review for anyone following it.

12 of 240 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The kernelset 2.4 is not that presentable... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    ntfs is "experimental"

    once you realize you are not the only one having problems with some code, you can turn to your peers to help you out. in this case, you should go look at a linux kernel mailing list archive. there are fixes for all sorts of code goofies.

    hope this helps.

    http://uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/

  2. Re:Wow! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Nope, I think it's a good idea. I love all the GNU tools, but sometimes you need a kernel with some real meat to it underneath your system, and for situations like that, Linux just doesn't cut it. I think this is geared towards people who need to harness the real advantages of UNIX, but don't want to go with Solaris or HP-UX and hunt down every tool they need, which can be quite a time-consuming process.

  3. Re:no gnome by icewind0 · · Score: 1, Informative

    My point wasnt 1 or 2. I guess im envisioning this 5 processor server to be sitting there serving, not a person to be sitting in front of it looking at a pretty desktop running gnome. It does come with KDE2 which makes it easier for people to use (should you need a graphical desktop to admin this thing). Also, it does come with CDE, so thats now two graphical desktops to choose from.

    Whats more, I think the article said the gnome libraries were installed, so presumably, if a developer wanted to run some gnome program (glade for example) all that he would need to do is install the rpm.

  4. Re:Yeah, but can Linux do this? by Darren+Winsper · · Score: 3, Informative

    Somebody has definately written patches to support CPU hot-swapping in Linux. i believe it's a matter of "cat 0 > /proc/sys/cpu/1/active" (Or something similar) to take a CPU down. You can then safely remove it, hardware support notwithstanding.

  5. the grass is always greener on the other side by mj6798 · · Score: 4, Informative
    If you want reliability, use the user space NFS server--it has been around for years, and it can be restarted easily. Or, you could, of course, just keep running a 2.2 kernel until whatever bugs you in 2.4 has stabilized.

    As for Solaris, its record is hardly stellar. For example, Solaris NFS for many years had a bug that would randomly replace blocks of data with blocks of nulls in big files (people often spent weeks trying to figure out what was wrong with their software until they finally traced it to Solaris). There have been memory leaks driver problems, and backwards incompatibilities with Solaris. Most production users of Solaris are a couple of years behind the releases in order to avoid the bugs in the new releases. And many people never wanted to switch from SunOS to Solaris at all (I think we are still running some SunOS machines).

    As they say, "the grass is always greener". I can tell you from many years living with SunOS/Solaris that Linux isn't bad in comparison.

  6. Big deal by mrdisco99 · · Score: 2, Informative

    IBM did this last year with AIX 5L. AND, it'll run on PPC, x86, and IA64. This was IBM's fork of the fabled Monterrey project (Unix' most promising vaporware) which died as soon as SCO got bought. I guess SCO's fork is just now coming out.

    Of course, when I submitted the story, it got rejected.

    --

    +++
    NO CARRIER

  7. Re:I have to wonder... by halbritt · · Score: 2, Informative

    Yes, SCO is indeed ancient, but the version of unix that they are releasing is probably one of the truest versions of UNIX that is still being actively developed., if that can be said about any version of UNIX. If you check out Éric Lévénez' UNIX History page he has a diagram in PDF and postscript format that shows the evolution of unix over the years. You'll notice that this product is a direct descendent of UNIX System III which was a product developed within AT&T in 1981 and derived directly from Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie's work at Bell Labs.

  8. Re:Yeah, but can Linux do this? by randombit · · Score: 3, Informative

    i believe it's a matter of "cat 0 > /proc/sys/cpu/1/active" (Or something similar)

    You would probably want to use echo, not cat. :)

    More info about it can be found here:

    link to mail archive.

  9. Re:What about the source? by Arandir · · Score: 3, Informative

    No GNU license requires that sources must be in ISO9660 format.

    No GNU license requires that sources be distributed to the public at large.

    Unless you're a Caldera customer who received GNU software with Open UNIX 8, they have no legal, moral or ethical obligation to give you anything.

    --
    A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
  10. technically, this is actually a good thing by sinator · · Score: 2, Informative


    As many have stated, GNU utilities are nothing new to SCO (cf. Skunkware). For those who aren't quite knowledgeable of SVR5, there *are* serious advantages to running a UNIX(tm) kernel as opposed to Linux. Not all of these are hardware related.

    UNIX(tm) has TLI and STREAMS support. Linus has explicitly decided that TLI is to be passed over in favor of sockets, and STREAMS isn't to be supported at all (leading to some hackneyed workarounds regarding ptys). So for those of you who will say "big deal, SCO kernel has some better hardware/threading/${FOO}, we'll develop the drivers/mutexes/${BAR} for it," there are some things that will never, ever be put into the main source tree due to administrative decision.

    Yes, TLI and STREAMS have inherent performance penalties, but they provide a much more sane API for driver development. Hardware today is fast enough to handle a small performance penalty that Linus' 386 could not.

    In short: This is a good thing, because it presents a system which runs on x86 which has significant DESIGN differences. Someone has opted for the other fork of the tradeoff branch; assuming the standard utilies and libc are in sync with Linux's GNU toolkit, this means that the same application can take advantage of two different paradigms for two different situations (BSD/sockets vs TLI+STREAMS). I guess this is like the BSD/a.out vs. Linux/ELF scenario of a couple years back. Each system has its pros and cons, programs are source compatible to work with either.

    Now that *that* little ruckus has been resolved...

    So this really is nothing new. UNIX kernel, (optional) GNU utilities (e.g, Skunkware). Most big UNIX vendors distributed UNIX utilities (Sun, SCO/Caldera,etc) with GNU utils. Hell, NeXT made gcc their default compiler (and charged thousands of dollars for it. Ha!). And it's a good thing. I'm glad.

    --
    Three Step Plan:
    1. Take over the world.
    2. Get a lot of cookies.
    3. Eat the cookies.
  11. Re:Not much new by chris.bitmead · · Score: 2, Informative

    Quite a few years ago, Sun paid a BIG chunk of
    money to own the full rights to their Sys V code.
    Something approaching $100 M if I remember. They
    paid this big chunk of money so they wouldn't be
    affected by this sort of situation.

  12. Re:Linux MODE by Dom2 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Sounds precisely like FreeBSD's Linux mode (which it's had for years). :-)

    -Dom