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Cool Linux Tricks With Atlas

Posted by timothy on from the largeness dept.

dpilgrim writes: "Looks like some powerful players want to see Linux going toe to toe with Unix 'big iron.' Would you like to be able to run two Linuxes simultaneously on the same box? Or seemless swap processor and memory in and out of your machine? The Atlas project aims to bring you all that and more. There's a press release from TurboLinux reported here, and a more in-depth article running on SourceForge's Linux on Large Systems Foundry."

3 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. Other idea by ocie · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Would you like to be able to run two Linuxes simultaneously on the same box?

    Actually, I'd like to be able to run one Linux on N boxes, or M Linuxes on N boxes where M!=N. Just immagine a cluster of 50 machines where the failure of one machine has no effect on the operation of the cluster as a whole. There are some good projects in this area, but I don't think they can quite offer this kind of transparency.

    --
    JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
  2. Re:Starcat by Hieronymus+Howard · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There aren't many reasons at the moment to switch from Solaris to Linux on big-iron hardware. But tomorrow is another matter...

    IBM is now marketing Linux as a big-iron OS and is actively selling S/390 mainframes with Linux. I believe that Linux now has a good chance of becoming the standard OS for big-iron systems - IBM and SGI first, then Compaq and HP, and finally Sun. Sun have switched Unixes before. I worked at Sun during the transition from SunOS 4 (BSD) to Solaris (SVR4). If they can do it once, they can do it again. Solaris is also gradually becoming more Linux-like, with a Linux compatability layer and Gnome. This could ease an eventual transition from Solaris to Linux. I'm not saying that this will happen, just that it's becoming increasingly likely.

    HH

  3. Interesting. by mindstrm · · Score: 4, Interesting

    A lot of people are going on and on about what linux can do that solaris can't.. cross platform, open source, etc...

    But I think your question was, given the Sparc platform.. why not use solaris?

    At this point, you are right. Solaris is where it's at.. I mean, if you are buying Sun.. you obviously want more than just a fast machine... you want the support, etc.

    But... as to why I prefer using linux to solaris, in general...
    Linux is the new reference platform. new tools are developed on linux first, then ported to other unixes (the mahjority, anyway).
    The number of tools quickly & easily available for linux vastly outnumbers the same for Solaris. Yes, you can get, compile, and run pretty much everything on solaris.. it's easy to port form linux to solaris.. but it's still easier to use linux.

    Linux is open.. I just, well, I DO like that. Sure, I'm not gonna go out and modify a kernel.. but it means I'm not necessarily stuck with what Sun tells me I'm stuck with.

    Would I buy a server farm of solaris boxes and run linux on it now? no.
    Would I if Linux sparc supportw as as good as it's intel support? probably (once SPM is fixed)