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Benjamin Herrenschmidt On PPC/Linux, Apple and OSS

Posted by Hemos on from the talkin'-bout-my-eople dept.

MacBoy writes "The folks over at ResExcellence have a great interview with Benjamin Herrenschmidt, kernel guru for the PPC/Linux camp. He offers up some history of Linux on Apple and PPC hardware, and some discussion on Apple's current and past contributions to the open-source and Linux communities. He makes some interesting comparisons of Linux on PPC vs. Intel hardware, such as the ease of getting important patches into the kernel on PPC compared to Intel. It's an interesting read, especially if you are amoung the many who covet the new Dual-CPU GHz G4 Macs and want to know a little more about the PPC/Linux community."

2 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Question: by acordes · · Score: 5, Informative

    People forget that the vast majority of the installed base of PowerPC chips is in embedded systems. Apple is a relatively small buyer of PowerPC chips. Linux is a great product for purposes such as those.

  2. Answer: performance (among other things) by raulmazda · · Score: 5, Informative
    Aside from all of the other reasons, OS X is a dog in comparison with Linux.

    The lmbench numbers show that linux is significantly faster for certain operations. I have a copy of the results that I pointed to in an old post over here. Linux spanks OS X. It's a reason.

    Other reasons include access to all of the source of your OS and better support for certain things (pcmcia 802.11b card support? Better filesystems. More software already working).

    I personally run Debian on my laptop 99% of the time because my environment is the same everywhere, and apt-get kicks ass (fink on OS X is cool, but there isn't as much stuff available).