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Chipmakers Angling For Support
defence budget writes "According to this article at CNet, what once happened with Intel and Microsoft might be happening with Linux, AMD and Intel. Apparently "In a sign of how strategic Linux has become, AMD and Intel are angling to lure open-source programmers to their future chip designs". I cannot see how the low end market will react to this, but surely the high end market should see the potential advantages in migrating to systems running on hardware custom built for Linux?"
Just think about it. Linux has the potential to take the market theat Solaris, AIX and HPUX have had for years. If Intel and AMD can get Linux apps to perform as well or better than the properitary OS's then they stand to make money because it will be there hardware in the boxes, not Sun HP or IBM. It would just seem to make sence to do what they are doing.
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LAMDTEL..
sounds more like a hitech butcher or something.
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What are people these days using computers for? What drives the market for high speed chips? --Games; That is what people are using windows for; if a chipmaker can say that their chips are specially designed for l00nix, then people will buy it, and start using l00nix more. The main problem with this trend is the fact that a windows user cannot at this point in time install and use l00nix like windows: stick in the CD, and sit back and relax for a while while the OS installs. l00nix is great for tweakers, hackers, and just plain h4rd-c0r3 people, but it is not ready for the general market, it is TOO custom. If tweaked enough, it WILL work on just about any configuration and system, but that is not good enough for gamers. If someone went the extra step and made l00nix more usable to the general public (I love it, I use little else, but i LIKE to tweak), THEN we could blow windows away... (although admittedly, GNOME is a good start). I am not saying making it necessarily more windows like, just more available in terms of usage. However, chipmakers starting the trend for "designed for l00nix" is most definetely good.
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
Although certainly having a specially-designed chip for Linux systems would be nice, Linux will forever be fragmented in the nature of its architecture simply because of its open-source design. So I think the primary source of reliability will come from the kernel and entire system itself, not so much from the chip on which it runs. And clearly, one of Linux's strongpoints has been its portability across chip designs. I can run Linux on my G4.. but also on a P3 system, if I were so inclined. There are so many Linux-based OSes out there these days.
Also, are the chip companies even targeting Linux? It seems to me that they're interested in open-source. But open-source does not mean Linux. Open-source is much larger as a concept than Linux is. And of course, I imagine that the future will be this: open-source programmers will be lured away by dollar signs (not in a bad way -- but hey, everyone's gotta eat). The companies will have a vested interest in making sure that these programmers are not working on things outside of the company itself, and in fact will also require that parts of the systems they develop will be proprietary. Just like Apple does. Darwin is open-source, but Aqua, Quartz, etc., are proprietary systems. And Apple nabbed the top guy for BSD, did they not?
I'm rambling now. But what I'm saying, basically, is that although i think this is primarily a good thing, the waters are still very muddy and the trail itself extends very far out.
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
According to the article, the hardware vendors are looking to Linux to force Microsoft to adopt new features. That's a strong testament to the power of competition! I know that Intel has hated their dependence upon Microsoft for a long time, and that Microsoft is delerious about AMD, since it untied them from Intel.
AMD really needs Linux on the hammer platform. Actually, they need Windows as well, but Linux is the club to force Microsoft to make the port. Intel is less dependent on Microsoft for the success of IA64 platforms, but mainstream adoption of new technologies like SMT (or hyperthreading, as they say) could really distinguish them from AMD performance-wise.
I'm usually pro-Microsoft around here, given the amount of nonsense Linux-propoganda spewed out, but I will be really happy when Linux can compete across the board, instead of just on servers. The benefits of competition are very high.
If you are modding me down because you disagree with me, use the "Flamebait" category, not the "Troll" one.
I don't know. I have a Matrox Millenium II that only just started working reliably as of Solaris 8 (or Solaris 7 with patches). It seems that when you do a certain thing to the card, the card stands about a 50% chance of getting confused and hanging the entire PCI bus.
Also inside the same case, I have two Western Digital IDE hard drives that won't both talk on the same bus if you set one of them to master and one to slave. It seems to only work if exactly *one* of them is set to cable select.
I also have an Intel motherboard (which is sitting in a drawer right now) that only allows me to use 64 MB of RAM. I bought that system in 1997. Sun's very first desktop SPARC system (the SPARCstation 1) could expand to 64 MB of RAM, and that was in 1990.
Also in the drawer, I have a Diamond Viper V770 Ultra whose fan has decided to make loud scraping noises. Diamond refused to sell me a replacement part, so I have an approximate match replacement part that I will install when I feel like getting out the soldering iron.
The system that had the Intel motherboard originally came with a Toshiba XM-6102B CD-ROM drive. When I first installed Solaris on that thing, I was afraid the driver was confused, because it was reporting all kinds of errors even though Windows didn't seem to have a problem with the drive at all. As time went on, the drive got worse and worse and eventually reached the point where it took 3 or 4 tries for it to recognize a CD.
All of these experiences with dodgy PC hardware are with *name* *brand* PC hardware that I've taken good care of. And, it's not like I've run through hundreds of systems, either. The amount of PC hardware I have ever owned in my life is not enough to build two working systems.
Basically, my experience with PC hardware is that it's cheaply made, and any given piece of hardware will probably be somewhere between limping along and working almost right but not quite. (Some hardware will just outright break, and some of it will be trouble-free for years and years, too.) Overall, I think this is a symptom of the fact that most PC consumers don't know to expect better, and also the pressure to make things as cheap as possible.
There is a lot of stuff out there that is just crap, and there is a lot of stuff out that there sort of works and sort of doesn't. Yes, you can get high quality PC parts, but the fact is that you have to be pretty choosy about it. Which brings me to my next point...
And let's not forget that practically everything in a Blade 100 is off-the-shelf PC parts, so that theory goes out the window.
I tend to think that the Blade 100 is going to be better built than a system you'd buy from some PC vendor, because Sun's attitude is different. Few manufacturers of any complex product like a computer actually make most of the stuff themselves. The reason Sun systems are reliable is that they select good parts, and test the system together as a whole. They have never controlled the whole process, but they do control more of the process for their machines than PC manufacturers do. I think this is what's going to lead to better quality.
(Part of the reason I think that is that it's my belief that one of the reasons PC hardware and software is so unreliable is the size of the market. It's prohibitively expensive to test everything with everything, and not only that, but it's also just very chaotic. It's difficult to make a system work well under those conditions. Sun doesn't suffer from that problem as much because their market is smaller and not only that but simpler.)
What Intel and AMD are really looking for is not as much for their products to conform to Linux as for Linux to conform to their products. Neither is a bad idea. However, the failure of the community to band together behind GCC 3, fix the major bugs, and get distros and other major software compiled with processor optimizations is going to cause these moves by the processor companies to fade away. A message to all developers everywhere: Help now with what you can in order to get code to compile cleanly on GCC 3!
>>Surely the high end market should see the potential advantages in migrating to systems running on hardware custom built for Linux?
Oddly enough, I can't think of any advantage. The trend in high end computing recently seems to be to move to commodity hardware. We have clusters of x86 machines. SGI is moving to an Intel platform. And Compaq has sold the Alpha to Intel.
I could be wrong of course...
This is just a reflection on the root cause of the obvious success that Linux continues to have, as evidenced by this story.
Somehow I think that the personality of the main visionary behind a piece of software does occasionally express itself in the software in certain subtle ways.
In The case of Linux vs MS, where people want to contribute their energies to some degree, where people give things to the project. This vs MS where alot of people do not want to contribute and where resources are boughtr, paid for, and taken.
Alot of this has to do with the social agreements regarding what is right and normal and just behavior for capitalism, big business, etc. It's what "everyone does". But this seems to be changing with the model of contribution and community help.
This community help model requires more healthy and alive community to work well, while the typical capitalist model can work in a perverse way with criminal types who steal resources. In fact, it can be difficult to avoid.
We eventually come to the point where we have the successes that we have today.
and we can say, with some logic, that the two operating systems and the companies, etc reflect the main personalites involved. Linux is much more community oriented, while MS is more imperial (or something), in its own way.
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Bearing all that in mind, why does anyone need custom Linux hardware?
Huh? all major distros are moving toward GCC 3.x in the near future. The standard ABI for C++ means that commercial applications (which are very often designed-by-committee baroque C++ monstrosties) will be much easier to port to linux.
If the chip makers were serious, they would start helping Linux out today. Case in point: gcc. Why don't the chip makers hand over their internal compilers to the GCC developers, so that GCC can produce optimal code for their processor? The SPEC marks for Intel CPUs are always achieved on some internal Intel compiler, that is sometimes available as a module for MSVC++. Why not release the same for Linux? I know Intel is working on it now, but what took them so long? And the same applies to AMD.
Similarly it looks like Linux on the AMD's Hammer chipset is already way underway as a project while according to the article Microsoft has no current plans to support that chipset.
For the high enders with cycle guzzling applications this is important. But for us lowly users this is baaad. I don't want to see a superior Linux on a more expensive chip that locks me into another Intel style relationship with a vendor. I want freedom to choose chips, mice, screens, OS, the lot. I want it all. I have it all! (almost) so don't lets go giving it away slipping down the platform dependant route - that way lies hell and OS taunting such has never before been seen!!!!
kennygeek "im mugh minmbe mex" {I use poorUX}
cartmangeek "Awww - cant the little poor boy afford Intel??"
who believed that most hardware is shoddily made crap. I cant remember when i last read a comparative review of PCs at a given price point where none of them had a dodgy display driver which failed basic timing tests, or a noisy fan, or faulty sound card, etc.
I've noticed that Mandrake 8.0 claims to be optimized for the G3 processor. Does this mean that gcc now has PowerPC optimizations? From what I've understood Linux on PowerPC (and possibly other architectures) was somewhat hobbled by the lack of decent PowerPC code generated from the compiler and that gcc pretty much only optimizes for the x86 architecture. Are there compilers out there readily available that now optimize for PowerPC?
On a related topic, one of the great points of Linux IMO is that can run on so many architectures. In a dream-world dominated by the Penguin, one could pick up the best h/w platform for its needs, without worring about software compatibility
Therefore, I am worried by anything that restricts the number of platforms on which Linux can run.
Ciao
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FB
well I think this is something we can thank microsoft for (not expecting more). Most people are used to computers crashing and not working. Weither it's a hardware failure or just another windows blue screen of death: most people just generalize it as "computer problems" and don't know much about what's going on underneath. Either that, or when ANYTHING goes wrong they blame it on a virus.
...the linux kernel includes a definition of the underlying processor architecture.
AMD already has a huge lead over intel, since their x86-64 architecture will be able to run old-fashioned x86-32 bit code straight out the box, so when Joe 6-pack goes to the store to buy a PC, it'll be a choice between a 3GHz Pentium IV and a (cheaper) 2.8GHz Clawhammer or something, running Windez XP. So, all those 64-bit machines will be out there in consumer land. Even the guys at HP reckon it'll take 10 years to see itanic (and its sucessors) widespread on the desktop. All the free UNIXes will be out there showing what you can do on commodity 64-bit hardware. Porting XP to x86-64 is therefore a no-brainer. Go AMD!
The feature in question is better support for virtualisation. I'm led to understand that half the reason projects like Plex86 and proprietary products like VMWare are so clever is that the x86 doesn't lend itself to virtualisation. You can't necessarily retrofit virtualisation, but I suspect you could wrap it around the existing architecture.
What I imagine this to look like in actual practice is a CPU that boots up in a mode where it's just a typical x86, but has a set of extra commands for creating and managing virtual x86en. A virtualisation-aware OS could then use these (privileged, I suppose) commands to initialise and execute virtual machines. Certain exceptions (configured at VM initialisation) would cause the virtual machine to break right back out to the real machine, dumping the virtual machine status in an appropriate location for later restoration.
Clearly there's a largish book worth of details I've left out, but this is just meant to be a seminal idea. I don't even pretend to have any real knowledge of the x86 architecture, specifically.
How would this help Linux? Well hey -- with a little bit of added tweaking, Linux could have 90% of the functionality of VMWare built into it. There are many other applications of virtualisation, and its addition to the core of Linux could make for some interesting possibilities. One application that springs to mind is the idea of having "multi-root" systems, where users can have their own root access to their own virtual system. If the virtualisation commands were also available in the virtual x86, then "virtual" would be a relative concept, and the root user of a virtual system could create more virtual systems of his own.
I think it's a good idea. Now bring on the applause and the clue-sticks.
AirSupply: go ahead, cut me off.
Not just that, but if you do find, say, a glitch in the L2 cache controller on an x86 design that might cause one lock up every year or so you can talk yourself out of fixing it since most x86 machines run Windows, and one extra crash a year will be unnoticed, and blamed on MS anyway.
The SPARC designers are going to assume you run Solaris, and one hardware caused crash a year may well be the crash for the year. Way more incentive to fix it.
Lest you think this is totally theroitical, I use to work for a company that owned 100 or so DEC PC machines with a little L2 problem... and we noticed because we were running a real OS.
Ah... but there is something important you are forgetting - patents.
My understanding is that a lot of the extremely useful optimisations are covered by patents owned by IBM, Intel, Microsoft, etc.
Now if IBM and Intel just opened up those patents then a lot more useful optimisations could be done. Otherwise we have the much more difficult route of the GCC developers having to come up with their own non-infringing optimisations.
Good design costs a lot of money, and well designed parts will cost more to make. Well designed parts will have more layers in the epoxy pcb, gold plated contacts, mil-spec chips, carefully thought-out design which keeps standing waves and impedance/unit length down, and so on. PC's DO NOT have well designed parts. Paraphrasing Eric Raymond's Hardware Howto, if most of the units barely work, in most machines, under light use, it's good enough for the PC market.
By the way, one doesn't test everything; it is enough to test a sample, and every manufacturer (execept the very worst) does that. If the sample is made large enough, you can drive the failure rate arbitrarily low. If the sample is made small (and thus cheap) enough, the large failure rate can be accepted, in the pc market. If it doesn't work, the customers will just return it. If it fails the day after the warrenty runs out, that's bonus.
Intel has secret opcodes even. Remember SETALC? Sets every bit in the AL register equal to the carry flag. It is actually supposed to be useful for something, but I forget what exactly.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
The previous comment is quite true about patents, but the understanding I got from the article was that Intel and AMD were thinking about this. If they force the optimizations to stay in their own compilers, they will lose out in many ways, and I thought that they were making the logical move of asking developers to start making these optimizations. I may quite possibly be misinformed. As for the inclusion problem, I do not see major distros moving to GCC 3.x right now. RH is apparently sticking with their modified 2.96 version for 7.2, the latest rant from glibc tells us 3.x will not be adopted, and so on and so forth. This is what I am commenting needs to change. (I have no complaints about the ABI, I think it's great.)
Redhat won't break binary compatability within a stable series. Good thing too, since their corporate customers would kill them.
George R.R. Martin's 'A Storm of Swords' should have won. Ah well.
Most hardware sales are going to companies, not individuals. And there the decision to buy high-speed CPU's is more of a "our computers are old, buy us new ones" thing from management than anything else. Large companies usually just get the best computers they can 'cause no one bothers to test for what they really need. Have you ever stopped to think of who buys those new systems and chips when they first come out? It's sure as hell not the home users - they can't afford it. Companies can.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
All the benefits you list for virtualisation could be realised by using the hurd.
ie multiple independent servers/users each with limited access to hardware, running in secure environments.
Elivs