Cool Linux Tricks With Atlas

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."

Comments

Starcat

[nbvb]

If I'm going to spend lots of money for hardware like this anyway, why would I use Linux?

I'm not trolling, I mean it. What does Linux offer me that Solaris doesn't?

And please avoid the philosophical ramifications -- I have nothing against commercial software, except that 99% of it sucks. :-)

--NBVB

Re:Starcat

[rgmoore]

I'm not trolling, I mean it. What does Linux offer me that Solaris doesn't?

The primary thing that Linux offers is the ability to run on non-Sun hardware. That's actually bigger than you might think. Consider the following ways that it might be nice:

• Your system is growing. You've been using Linux on comodity x86 hardware to this point, but you now need a bigger machine. Having a bigger machine available that can run Linux should make the transition easier.
• You wish to avoid vendor lock-in. Yes, Sun makes nice machines, but so do other manufacturers like IBM, HP, etc. If every manufacturer has Linux available as an OS, it's much easier to jump to another vendor if circumstances dictate.
• You anticipate that IA64 will be competitive with SPARC in the near future, so you're going to buy comodity IA64 hardware instead of single vendor Sun stuff. Since Solaris is only available for Sun platforms, it won't be an option.

Basically, the fact that big iron manufacturers already have their own OSes is not a strong argument about adding big-iron features to Linux. That's especially true if I'm a manufacturer and I want to break into that very lucrative market. It may very well be cheaper for me to help to develop the needed features in Linux and put that on my new hardware than to develop my own OS. By making those things available in a comodity OS you have the potential to convert big iron into a comodity market, just as comodity OSes for desktop systems helped turn them into comodity goods.

Re:Starcat

[bconway]

You can download the Solaris source code to your heart's content here. You can edit, change, and rebuild all you like if it will really suit your needs. You can send patches back to Sun if you feel so inclined for incorporation. The only thing you can't do is redistribute it, which from what it sounds like your needs are, really isn't that important anyways.

What we need

[TheEviscerator]

It's important to remember that much of Linux's competition comes not from the dreaded MS, but from commercial UNIX vendors, like Sun and IBM.

Most companies that currently employ Linux tend to use it for things like DNS, Web servers, and file sharing. Fitting Linux with enterprise features is critical in moving beyond these types of services and truly entering the enterprise world of hot plugging, scalability, and *proven* reliability.

While I realize that its reliability is more than proven to most of us here, it's important that it be proven to executives as well. Not only must it be reliable, but proven companies must have track records of standing behind the product 100%.

One concern I've heard voiced is that no company providing support for Linux will take ultimate responsiblity for a product that isn't theirs.

Get a few more years and services behind Linux, and we should see it explode.

Looks more like Intel toe to toe with 'big iron'

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Looks like some powerful players want to see Linux going toe to toe with Unix 'big iron.'

This isn't a linux issue. It's a hardware issue.

The significant thing about 'big iron' is that it's an enabling hardware technology.

Once you have it you can write firmware and software that creates the illusion that the hardware never fails

Until you have it, you can't.

The hardware described looks about right - if they handled machine checks properly. (And the fact that they even used the term implies they either did or are trying.) Basic idea: The machine catches ANY error, with enough state saved that you can:

CORRECT the error

IDENTIFY any failed components,

MOVE tasks to non-failed components or reconfigure the failing components to limp along,

NOTIFY the OS of any problem, so it can do things like start moving things off a dying component, and

pick up the computation where it left off WITHOUT the error.

When you can do this you can write a modified Linux, Windows, BeOS, or what-have-you that can do the things a mainframe can. (But you'll need to have a REALLY reliable OS for your starting point - you're now talking uptimes measured in decades. The software better not take the system down in the absense of hardware trouble, and there IS NO hardware troube. B-) )

Hot-swappable parts are more a side-effect than something key. You have to be able to hot-swap to replace a broken part with the system live. Once you have the ability to hot-swap in a replacement for a failed part and add it back into a running domain, it's trivial to generalize that to "fix" parts that were "bad" because they had never been installed.

Partitioning is also implied: You need a minimum of two domains ("virtual machine" subsets of the total device) - working (where the live system is) and diagnostic (where the maintainence guys check out the parts). Once you have that mechanism, making a LARGE number of working domains (with varying amounts of resource, including full or time-shared CPUs) is straightforward.