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Benjamin Herrenschmidt On PPC/Linux, Apple and OSS
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."
PPC/Linux seems like an ambitious and technically interesting project, no doubt. Personally, though, I don't seem to understand the purpose. MacOs X is based on BSD, so you get all the nice Unix-like server features... and a decent GUI, something that Linux has never had. Are there some other advantages of Linux/PPC that I'm missing?
If guns kill people, then CmdrTaco's keyboard misspells words.
Despite the early antagonism between the league for programming freedom and Apple, Macs and Unix went together pretty well. Long before samba, 680X0 Macs were sharing files quite nicely with unix servers. In many disciplines at universities, unix was used for heavy lifting, and macs were used for light word processing and making drawings.
Linuxppc has benefited from the generally better hardware on the PowerPC (higher quality and reliability, and less diversity). Also, for much of the '90s, the PPC chip was faster for many things than ix86. Recently, I had a 90 MHz powermac running KDE, xemacs, and Netscape without a hitch for months without any hiccups (a little slow but definitely useable). Under MacOS the thing would lock up several times a day. OS X is not an option for these older macs.
My old Mac died but I hope to get an ibook soon and put Linux on it. By the way, I wish there was something like fips for shrinking Mac partitions for people that want to dual boot.
Of course, the long-standing debate between Mac and Windows (I use the term generally) users has been that of their respective platform's performance. Sure, Max users complain that Windows is ugly, Windows user complain that Mac OS doesn't have enough apps...BUT, the big ticket is always when they start comparing Intel (or AMD) processors to their PPC competitors.
With Linux on both platforms, I would be interested to see some comprehensive real-world benchmarks comparing the two platforms. Really, I'm rather tired of the "Megahertz-myth" PPC touters and the "RISC sucks" x86 campions arguing which is better without any solid numbers.
-Jayde
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Linux is often faster. Just like Intel Linux, it's possible to create a custom stripped down desktop with no fat. I've become accustomed to how things work on my Intel Linux machines and like having almost the same environment on my Pismo Powerbook. I also prefer the GNU utilities over the BSD ones (flame away...it's just a preference...get over it).
OSX is also next to useless on older hardware. We use 233Mhz Beige G3 desktop as an internal server. It's running ssh, Apache-SSL, NTP, mySQL, Apache, and Netatalk. The Apache/mySQL setup powers our troubleticket/inventory system. The Netatalk/Samba combo makes files available to both Mac and Windows clients. It does all of this with very acceptable speed and reliablity. The machine has zero need for a GUI...and doesn't have one. I suppose I could use Darwin but the machine wouldn't do it's work any better and I would have to mess with fussy ports of the daemons. It has full apt-get goodness....I forgot to mention that it is dead easy to admin.
So yeah, there are valid reasons to use Linux on PPC hardware.
Lets forget about OS-X for a moment. What LinuxPPC does is fix the mac by providing a real operating system for it. There are macs where I work, and every time I'm stuck using one I start getting crazy notions in my head about taking a sledge hammer to them all, or finding some other way of destroying them. The reason has nothing to do with the hardware they are running. They're not super fast, but I'm not particularly picky in that area. What bugs me about them is the antique operating system they're running. If I wanted cooperative multi-tasking and no memory protection between apps, I'd run windows 3.1. When I sit down in front of a computer I expect the system to be responsive to me, regardless of what it is doing in the background.
One day about a year ago I loaded up the PPC version of SuSE 7.0 onto one of the macs. Lo and behold!!! A new computer was born! Or at least it seemed that way. The computer actually seemed to run FASTER as well as being infinitely more responsive. I was also a great relief to escape from the Macs GUI, which I find cumbersome. It was like I was trying to run with a cinder block tied to my leg and someone just cut the cord. Unfortunately I eventually had to wipe Linux and reinstall MacOS-9 on it.
Nowadays we have OS-X, which is about 6 years late, but better late than never. Its GUI isn't on par with KDE, but its far better than the previous MacOS versions. Its also responsive! Its great to actually be able to have my computer wait on me rather than the other way around. Its not terribly fast, but I'm not going to complain! Much better that it take longer to do things in the background but be more responsive in the foreground than it lock me out. Hopefully IBM/Motorola/Apple will be able to push the PPC architecture further in terms of clock rate.
Then of course there are the standard form-factor PPC motherboards that will soon be available. Whether they will ever outperform an Athlon based system is doubtful, but the fact that they are there and available is a good thing.
Lee
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I gotta tell you, for many kinds of work, the G4 is a much better choice as a CPU. On the Mac, we are doing real-time transitions and effects in broadcast-quality video editing with no accelerator hardware, on NOTEBOOKS, and it is fucking great. Video effects, audio effects, encoding, and heavy graphics transformations are much faster on the Mac. If you think about it, this is no surprise ... that's who Apple's customers are, and we don't buy a new Mac because of how it looks (that's for the iMac and iBook crowd of mostly home users). When Steve Jobs does the Photoshop and Media Cleaner Pro shootouts, they're not picking one or two transforms that run better and doing them again and again, they're running scripts (Photoshop scripts and whatever automation Media Cleaner Pro has) that come from actual users and contain an entire workday or workflow, every step that the user took to create a movie poster, or convert a video clip and encode it for the Web. It's like having twin robotic users who sit down at the two systems (Mac and PC) and do the same exact thing for a whole day, only pausing to wait for the computer to catch up (as it runs filters and such). It's a very, very good real-world benchmark, and it holds true when you ask real users about their experiences. The reason Photoshop is a good choice is that you have to wait for an operation to finish before you go on to the next one (so you can see what you're doing), so you spend a lot of time looking at progress bars all day. When a machine lessens that time, it's worth real money, and that's why you see Power Macs in art departments and other creative settings. We're not setting up a 12-hour compiling operation and coming back in the morning to see it done, we're running something that we need to have NOW, ASAP. Also, in audio and video, you are often running things in real-time (audio effects like reverbs, video transitions) and the DSP power of Altivec just kicks ass on this stuff, and is well-supported by all the heavy-lifting software titles.
Also, the low-power nature of the G4 means that my PowerBook G4 has every conceivable feature (even Gigabit Ethernet, built-in 802.11, FireWire, PC Card, 1GB RAM) and desktop power (real-time video effects and transforms again) and yet the small fan only comes on once in a while. Since I work with audio, this is a real feature for me, not just a nicety.
Anyway, you may see the "Megahertz Myth" as Apple justifying their lower-clock-speed CPU's, but those of us who are benefiting from the G4's features see the "Megahertz Myth" as Intel justifying the marketing-inspired design decisions (20 pipelines?!!) that got them to these high clock speeds. Alphas, Sparcs, G4's, IBM's Powers, and other CPU's are all doing ~10 pipelines and ~1GHz, while Intel is doing 20 pipelines and 2GHz using the same kinds of processes and current chip technologies. It's a trick of numbers more than anything. Certainly, we Mac users are not sitting down at Windows boxes with 2GHz chips and having our hair blown back. We're underwhelmed, if anything, and it's still slow, buggy Windows, too. If everyone else was doing 2GHz and the G4 was the only one at 1GHz, then you'd have a better case, but Intel is the freak here, so I would suggest that they are the ones that merit closer inspection of what's really going on with them. The pipelines number just jumps out at anyone who has even a layman's understanding of CPU architecture.
Nothing against OSX, but in all honesty even a fully loaded Linux desktop will take less RAM than OSX. I'm running a fully loaded KDE right now, with Mozilla (rumor says it's bloated), StarOffice 6.0, and Kmail, and my used (not cache) memory is only at 64MB. Note that only KDE and Kmail share many libraries.
I don't know where people get this idea that you need a ton of memory to run these programs. Granted, 128MB is little on the high side if you're talking real low end, but these are desktop workstations, as you said. OSX requires that 128 at a bare minimum, and even that maxed out when I was using 10.0 (don't know if they decreased the RAM requirements as of 10.1, but I doubt it). Linux apps just don't take as much memory as people say. KDE gets you a solid UI with a lot of bells and whistles for relatively low memory cost. Plus, the inclined desktop user could simply run fluxbox or twm, which isn't possible without Darwin, in which case you can't easily switch to Aqua. OSX is great, but Linux has its advantages too.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."