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.

Comments

Re:Yeah, but can Linux do this?

[Darren Winsper]

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.

the grass is always greener on the other side

[mj6798]

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.

Re:Yeah, but can Linux do this?

[randombit]

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.

Re:What about the source?

[Arandir]

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.