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IBM Wants Linux
jsse writes "In a news conference IBM's senior vice president Steve Mills said 'the company will gladly drop its version of Unix from servers and replace it with Linux if the software matures so that it can handle the most demanding tasks.' Now the Giant, along with many other companies, jump to Linux bandwagon. The question is wether this bandwagon is capable of carrying a Giant that huge. Or the question is: can Linux beats AIX?"
IBM has just jumped on the bandwagon?? They've been there for a while buddy. You can already buy most of IBM's software for Linux. They've been investing in Linux like crazy for the last 2 years
The (Hopefully) Great Slashdot Blackout Apr 21-27
Now the Giant, along with many other companies, jump to Linux bandwagon. The question is wether this bandwagon is capable of carrying a Giant that huge. Or the question is: can Linux beats AIX?"
Um... All your base?
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Of all the unixen I have played with AIX is one of the worst. Only Conrol data's unix and NCR was worse. Their smit admin tool is pretty cool, but everything else looks like nothing else, and porting stuff to AIX is no fun.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
Now if only all of the other vendors realized that they were selling hardware instead of UNIX, they'd be happy to switch to Linux.
Actually, they probably all have some kind of "ditch-our-crappy-UNIX-for-Linux" roadmap. Some are much further away than others. But it'd be nice if it actually happened.
Perhaps the Open Source Community is up to the challenge, but AIX performs admirably in exactly the machines and situations in which Linux does the worst: multi-processor non-intel boxes with 4+ gigs of RAM. Right now, a person would be nuts to run linux in production on an RS/6000. The package stability on that hardware is sketchy, at best.
IBM's also spent a lot of time doing little things like graphics acceleration for their workstations that Linux can't yet strongly match.
As much as I'd like to see the death of AIX and dance on SMIT's grave, I think we're seeing the same story at the enterprise level as we always have: Operating Systems designed for enterprise hardware tend to be better on that hardware than Operating Systems designed for low-end microcomputers. If IBM dumped a hundred developers into pushing linux on its Power-based hardware, then we might see something to compete with AIX; as it is, there isn't a large enough install base for linux development to acheive critical mass.
IMHO, natch.
I'm reminded of the scene in "Pirates of Silicon Valley" where Gates and company were sitting down to negotiate with IBM and it was said, "Everybody knows that the real money is made in hardware, not software".
Well IBM was wrong at the time in that statement but it might finally be the truth.
It also makes sense for IBM from a financial perspective. Instead of having a building full of programmers/managers and other overhead that eats up corporate profits just to support AIX, why not outsource that dependency to the open-source users of the world. Big blue then reduces their expenses, increases their income and the open-source community gets a juggernaut pulling for their team. A win-win situation if I've ever heard one.
p.s. - These are my opinions and not my employers who happens to be discussed in this thread.
-- "In a time of drastic change it is the learners who survive; the 'learned' find themselves fully equipped to live in
They tried to write the paper, but...Word crashed.
The Drowned and the Saved - Primo Levi
I think IBM's doing this for one very good reason. The more linux hackers there are at home running linux on their personal boxes, the more workers there will be in the industry that say "IBM makes this big box that will do all we need for our web and/or accounting needs, and it runs an OS I already know."
Managers like to hear that so they don't buy something their IT people don't know how to run.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
The problem I see with this is that if a company as big as IBM wants to use something like Linux, they're going to want some kind of control of the direction it goes. Companies have been trying to get Linus to loosen his 'control' of the kernel for a while now. No company with smart leadership will drop support for a product that they have complete power over, in favor of an OS where they have little-to-no control over the direction that it takes.
However, we've seen that IBM has put a fairly good amount of time, money, and effort into making Linux compatable with their products, and their products compatable with linux itself. But so far, I just don't seem them dropping AIX for Linux anytime soon. Not until the control over the linux kernel becomes more decentralized.
I'm sure IBM does a great deal of validation testing. Why not tell the kernel developers where things come up short? One of the most valuable development prerequisites are good bug reports. IBM could unleash their testing team. Or does politics get in the way -- the testing team manager doesn't approve of the Linux takeover?
1. As has already been stated IBM has been on the Linux bandwagon for several years now.
2. This makes perfect sense for IBM. They are mainly a service company and secondly a hardware company. Anyone who has done business with IBM knows that they, like most other large computer companies, make their money on installation and support. If they can cut the expense of developing their own OS they can focus on their core business.
Sorry to all the Linux kids out there, but real Unix Operating Systems, such as Solaris and BSD-based systems, are stronger, more stable, and faster, when set up correctly, then linux will ever be. Why? simple: SLC's are there for a reason. The linux kernel may be controlled and coordinated by one person, but imagine a person with the supposed talent of Linus, times 50, working on making the Solaris Kernel better.
Note: I am not a Solaris advocate.
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It also makes sense for IBM from a financial perspective. Instead of having a building full of programmers/managers and other overhead that eats up corporate profits just to support AIX, why not outsource that dependency to the open-source users of the world. Big blue then reduces their expenses, increases their income and the open-source community gets a juggernaut pulling for their team. A win-win situation if I've ever heard one.
Do you honestly think that if IBM were to ditch AIX for linux that this would happen? The value of running IBM hardware and software is that IBM is there to fix it right away. Find a bug in AIX? IBM gets on it in a timely fashion. If anything, I would wager that IBM will fork their own version of Linux if they decide to forgo AIX. Large corporations like the track history and reputation of IBM and are frightened by the lack of the same for Linux. IMHO that seems to be what stops large-scale deployment of Linux in the corporate world - who is going to take ownership of this problem and provide us with patches?
BTW - from what I have seen, (as an IBM'er) the revenue and profits come from annual support and maintenance contracts, not from hardware and software sales per se.
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
But assuming that GNU/Linux can evolve to an acceptable level (the level of UNIX, in other words), and assuming that the support from IBM, HP, Sun, and Compaq continues, we'll be in a great position. One of the promises of UNIX was portability; if five commercial UNIXs have a common interface, they should be easy to port between, right?
Wrong... years of corporate specialization and AT&T's rightful protection of the system have created a computing culture which is almost as closed as Microsoft's. Now, porting an application from Solaris to HP-UX can potentially take as long as porting from Solaris to NT.
Enter GNU/Linux. Stallman, Torvalds, and the rest of the usual suspects essentially ripped off AT&T. (It's crucial that you understand this. While those developers can be thanked for the GNU/Linux implementation, the design and archiecture is stolen-- albeit modifed -- IP.) GNU/Linux is UNIX-like, but is also completely open. Thus, if Linux can meet these corporate giants' needs, they should adopt it.
IBM's adoption of Linux for the enterprise will mean many things. It will mean that RS/6000 customers like myself will get new software faster, because Linux is always ahead of AIX on software developers' port lists. And if Linux can also run reasonably on Sun and HP hardware, then we could be talking about UNIX's dream of portability, embodied in GNU/Linux: an open, common interface for hardcore RISC systems. This would be a good thing for everybody expect supporters of inferior x86 servers: x86 hardware vendors and Microsoft.
But while GNU/Linux has brought this uptopia one step closer, it isn't here yet. Talk to any knowledgable, experienced developer or sysadmin, and he will tell you that GNU/Linux simply can't touch UNIX for the majority of serious computing tasks. Linux is cheaper, and in some instances is faster, but just can't deliver the same kind of scalable performance and rock-solid availabilty that are the reasons I'm running AIX right now.
--
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It would really be nice to see someone (IBM) try to build a Linux desktop system. With high quality hardware and Linux with GNOME or KDE we would end up with a machine resembling an Apple G4 + OS X.
Could there be any money in such a move?
These machines have the same hardware, but different OS-es. The RS/6000 group ships their systems with AIX, while the AS/400 group ships their systems with OS/400 and if the customer wants a Unix, with Linux, not with AIX.
Rumour has it that the groups don't like eachother that much. What I wonder now is: is IBM axing the complete RS/6000 group in favor of the AS/400 group?
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Remember OS/2? OS/2 is currently making the most money it ever has for IBM, simply because it's in maintenance cycle now... IBM simply does no new development, and continues to make money on support, while encouraging folks to consider other OS options.
IBM never completely drops support, and would never leave profitable AIX shops out in the cold.
IBM did umm the patch to run on S390
(evil clock ticks evil interupts muhhaha)
so what do you mean ?
regards
john jones
p.s. list of kernel work from SGI looks like big iron in many ways I cant find a IBM page anywhere or heard of any of their work beyond the NGPthreads and s390 patchs
(oh yeah and the PowerPC port which IBM does a good job of helping out)
Linux Scalability
Kernprof (Kernel Profiling)
SGI kGDB (Remote host Linux kernel debugger via GDB)
NUMA (NUMA support in Linux)
Bigmem (Big Memory support for Linux)
Lockmeter (Linux kernel lock-metering)
Post/Wait (Post/Wait Synchronization)
SGI kdb (Linux kernel debugger)
Raw I/O (Enhancements to Linux raw I/O capabilities)
POSIX Asynchronous I/O (KAIO)
LKCD (Linux Kernel Crash Dumps)
STP (Scheduled Transfer Protocol)
well, will those quite familiar with aix please enlighten us with what linux could be missing? it's got xfs, lvm, ppc support. and that's about the end of what i know aix and linux now share.
Well, as a SysAdmin who manages 50 AIX servers and 20 Solaris servers I can try to offer some info.
As has been written in a couple of posts already, AIX is designed to run on enterprise-level hardware. The bonus is that since the OS and hardware all come from IBM, there is a single point of contact for those problems. There are some really cool things that separate AIX from other UNIX's:
* Most of the critical OS functions can be controlled via the SMIT interface.
* Unlike other flavours of UNIX, AIX does not use flat files to define parameters for daemons. AIX has all the relevant information stored in an internal database (The ODM).
* AIX ships with a journaled file system and file systems can be grown on the fly.
* AIX gives way more control over disk management than other flavours of UNIX. It is easy to implement the various type sof RAID. AIX also lets you control where certain files can be physically located on your disk, and during off-peak hours the system can move files around to re-organize the disks.
* It is trivial to create a complete image of the system on a bootable tape, so disaster recovery is a snap.
There are some downsides to AIX:
* AIX takes >5 minutes to boot.
* If the ODM gets corrupted, your system can be toast.
* Sometimes it is necessary to modify the ODM directly, and this can be a bit risky (see above)
* Third-party support for AIX is sketchy. It is better to use IBM applications where possible.
* IBM hardware is more expensive than the alternatives. You pay a premium for Big Blue.
Of the downsides, the last is the most significant. Not many non-IBM vendors write applications for it, and even if they do, Solaris, and Linux get more attention.
Sorry for sounding like a commercial for IBM, but I like AIX. It does some things very well, and is quite stable. My team manages a lot of mission-critical servers and AIX is nice to work with. We have talked briefly about Linux, the perception is that Linux is not yet ready for enterprise-class workload.
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
Linux doesn't have STREAMS or TLI support; this means that device drivers are significantly different from the rest of the (commercial) UNIX(TM) world. There are third party patches, but STREAMS will never make it into the source tree, because Linus has explicitly rejected it.
Linux doesn't (AFAIK -- correct me if I am wrong!) have run-time tunable quanta (timeslices) for scheduling. The 'jiffy' (minimum unit of time measurement) is still tied to a 100 Hz clock (except on Alpha, where it is 1024Hz). Other run-time tunable parameters include features like page replacement algorithms (when to replace pages in memory). Solaris has a 'two-handed clock sweep' algorithm, and runtime tunable parameters include the 'spread' between the 'hands' and the speed of the 'clock rotation' (cf. Stallings, William. Operating Systems)
This isn't a linux problem per se, but the gcc toolkit doesn't make the best object code on any target other than x86. That's why solaris distributes gcc with solaris8 but remains confident you're going to get /opt/SUNWpro compilers. Same goes with Tru64, etc. etc. Since most commercial Unices run on non-Intel platforms (Solaris, AIX, Tru64, Mac OS X, HP-UX, IRIX) it generally means that you're not going to get the best executables if you use gcc (exceptions include Mac OS X)
As others have said, NUMA doesn't scale well. Linux proper doesn't have good 'processor affinity' (ie, tying a process to a specific processor).
Linux doesn't have good capabilities support or support for ACLs. While some capabilities exist (eg, CAP_DAC_OVERRIDE for embedded systems without filesystems, or the capability to bind to ports < 1024 without being root), a lot of big-iron systems need capabilities more approaching that of VMS or Windows NT kernel (note I said kernel, not Win32). You can get some capabilities with LIDS, but that's generally related to the CAP_DAC and CAP_MAC set, without much more. As for ACLs, you *can* find some patches, but they're most certainly not standard. Moreover, VFS isn't quite set for things like LVM, much less filesystem plug-ins (witness the hullaballoo in putting ReiserFS in the system because it didn't conform to VFS conventions).
Linux failover and high-availability generally applies to clustering solutions; I've yet to see things like hot-swappable CPUs or multiple backplane support in Linux.
This isn't to say Linux isn't great. I use it along with OpenStep and FreeBSD as my main operating systems. Most people don't need the above, or the penalties for uniprocessor x86 hardware are high (who wants STREAMS on an IBM PC-compatible?). But for commercial UNIX (TM), the above is pretty relied upon.
Three Step Plan:
1. Take over the world.
2. Get a lot of cookies.
3. Eat the cookies.
My work on the FOLK project (IMHO) demonstrates that all the technology needed to support highly-scalable Linux systems, with all the capabilities any corporation would expect from a top-of-the-line OS.
HOWEVER, the patches necessary to get Linux to that point are NOT yet part of the mainstream kernel, and in some cases, maintenance is...
This leads to the "not obvious" answer -- IBM has to do it's OWN "FOLK-style" project, to include the necessary capabilities, essentially forking the patches to keep them in line with the kernel.
IBM would ALSO have to do a thorough kernel audit. For for the FOLK project, we're looking at reverse-engineering the specification, fixing that, and then fixing the code to match. (The reason for using that approach is that specs are generally easier to debug, and are generally a LOT shorter, making it practical for one or two people to do.)
The argument about Linux "not scaling" is true -and- false. SGI showed that part of the problem was in the scheduling. HP has an excellent scheduler plug-in system, so you can have schedulers that are optimal for any given configuration, if you really want.
There's also a problem of latency, but the low-latency patches deal with many of those issues.
Of course, not all clusters are going to be simple arrays of processors. You might have nodes on a VME bus. No problem - the VME patch takes care of that.
Then, you have local-area and wide-area clusters. MOSIX and bproc deal with those issues, too.
For those still using transputers, there is an excellent b.004/b.008 link driver, out there.
Software base too limited? There's an ABI patch, which gives you support for a wide range of UNIX OS' binaries. The WINE patch is pretty decent, too.
All in all, if IBM play their cards right, and pull Linux out of the quagmire its been in, this could benefit both IBM and Linux enormously.
(Quagmire? What quagmire? The Linux kernel's rate of development has not been impressive, in the 2.[34] arena, even though development of Linux kernel code is as fast as it has ever been. Linus has wanted to slow down, but I worry that it has become -too- slow, and risks getting stuck in pure-and-simple human inertia. The IPv6 stack, for example, is now WAAAY behind the USAGI version, despite the fact that the Linux IPv6 has had many more years in which to develop and grow.)
I really and truly hope that this is the Miracle Grow for Linux, and not the Strimmer. I guess we'll have to wait and see.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
(It's crucial that you understand this. While those developers can be thanked for the GNU/Linux implementation, the design and archiecture is stolen-- albeit modifed -- IP.)
... namely from MINIX, which was a minimal, educational recreation of UNIX 7), not stolen in any sense of the word, not even in the "newspeak" sense that the Copyright Cartels and DMCA Apologists have redefined the word to mean.
While you make some good points, I take exception to this characterization of GNU/Linux's similarity to UNIX and its POSIX compliance as "stolen IP." Numerous court decisions, including Apple v. Microsoft, have consistently ruled that compatiblity, compliance to standards, and even the wholesale mimicking of a competitor's look and feel do not constitute a violation of intellectual property in any manner. The design and architecture were copied legally (actually, to be historically accurate, they were copied from a copy
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
A few years ago (1995-1997) I actively maintained several AIX boxes as part of my job as a Unix sysadmin, and thus got to know the nasty beast first-hand. Granted, AIX is twisted and mutant, but there are a couple of areas where it does rock.
/etc/inittab -- it will happily let you edit /etc/inittab and do whatever you want with it, but it will quietly go behind your back and undo all the changes you made. To change /etc/inittab, you have to go through certain AIX commands that I have forgotten. There actually was a reason for this, but the details have slipped away.
/, because then you had to make sure to make the new disk bootable (and generally every AIX sysadmin would screw this up the first time and destroy the system as a result, but see the second point below). The volume manager lets you create and delete and resize filesystems on the fly; it wasn't so good at shrinking filesystems back in 1995 but I'm sure it's gotten better since then. My sysadmin style between Solaris and AIX was totally different: on AIX I'd create filesystems exactly as large as I needed them at the time, and would only grow them when they got to 99% full or so, whereas on Solaris w/o Veritas I'd simply slice up the disk into as few filesystems as possible and allocate all the disks at system install. The AIX way was lots more flexible, though it did involve the loss of the traditional BSD-style disk slice partitioning.
First let me pass along an analogy told to me (alas I don't know its origin). There were these two intelligent alien races. They didn't know each other's language, but they did have a universal translator that could translate between them; however it was somewhat buggy and didn't always do a terribly good job, but it was good enough most of the time. The first alien race had BSD Unix, and knowledge of System V Unix, and told it to the second alien race through the broken universal translator. The second race, thus enlightened, went off and wrote: AIX.
Humor aside, my AIX experience was something like "SUCKS" "SUCKS" "SUCKS" "oh wait, this is cool" "SUCKS", heh. What the open source community needs to do is identify the cool parts and add them to our own OSen. An example of what NOT to add would be the way AIX plays fast and loose with
Ok, on to the actual cool things about AIX. For those of you that have used Solaris + Veritas, you already know how useful it can be, and what a pain in the ass it can be as well. AIX has had a volume manager for longer than any other Unix, and does it quite a bit better. In 1995, it was no problem at all to take all the data/filesystems on one disk and migrate them all to another disk transparently without taking the OS down or even degrading performance very much. Well, except if you were moving
The other thing that AIX totally rocked on was its backup command, mksysb. This created a bootable tape with the entirety of the root volume on it (generally you'd have a root volume with all the system filesystems, and a data volume for your big-ass database etc.) Literally all you had to do to restore your system was change the keyswitch into 'Service' mode, pop the tape into the tape drive, and power the system on. It would boot off the bootable tape, find all the backup info, and restore the entire system to what it was at the time of the backup. No muss, no fuss, it just worked. It saved my bacon a couple of times, and it certainly made for less frazzled sysadmin nerves, knowing that no matter how badly you hosed the system, you could go to the last backup and you wouldn't have to even think to restore the thing, just pop in the tape, boot it up, let it do its thing, and go have a beer.
Anyways, these were the two brightest shining points of sysadminning AIX when I was doing it. I'd love to have either/both of these features on any OS I'm responsible for, and I'm sure that these are the kinds of things that IBM wants from Linux.
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
the RS/6000 software cannot run on the AS/400 hardware and vica-versa. The As/400 PowerPc chips are unique from what I have seen in the IBM server offerings.
/390, a As/400, and an RS/6000 all servers - and they all appeal to different corporate cultures you can make some impressive sales)
Now there is competition between all groups in IBM, which is probably one reason IBM sells lots of servers (when you can call a
Now, the As/400 runs Linux virtualized... with no real perfomance penalty, and this is how they run Apache, which btw is mostly threaded because of Rochester As/400 programmers...
The key to the whole article is that Linux receives a lot of press, but its not a powerful operating system. Its an average operating system that is open to peer review, and average and open can mean many times more value than excellent and closed.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I imagine that IBM would attempt to avoid forking the kernel. OTOH, they would be quite likely to come out with their own distribution. Or to rebrand one of the extant ones. They might even buy the company, but probably not. But I suspect that an "IBM Linux" would be quite acceptable to many people. And if they had to edit the code the remove all the red hats, or top hats, that would be a minor expense. Don't think of a fork, think of the way Mandrake started.
Now IBM would probably only sell their distribution to those who bought their hardware, but they might well be willing to sell maintenance contracts (which might [optionally?] include their distribution) to anyone. Just as Red Hat prefers to support customers who are running Red Hat Linux, because it cuts down on the variety of problems that they have to deal with, so it increases their profits without increasing their expenses.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
They never put me under an NDA, so I assume this is public:
They are actually doing quite a bit of work porting linux to the iSeries (AS/400) and pSeries (RS/3000 et al). They are writing libraries that allow Linux applications to run on AIX.
One of their biggest projects is helping to fix/improve SMP support in Linux, and hopefully make it reach the point where it can handle the 24 processor systems they want to put it on. This includes improving I/O, and memory management, and handling large numbers of simultaneous processes.
These are things that Linux does okay on, but the power, resources and money that IBM is willing to put into it will help poor Open Source developers quite a bit.
The best part: They are releasing the code they write back to the community. They are actually helping. I think this is what you wanted to here. IBM is on our side. (in this case)
Source: I interviewed for one of the positions which would be porting Linux to the AS/400, now sadly named the iSeries. I didn't take it though. Don't be mad at me.