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Sun's Linux Exec Departs
HyperbolicParabaloid writes "The NY Times (free reg blah blah) has an article about the departure of Sun's no.2 exec, but also mentions that
Stephen DeWitt, the vice president of an important business unit that leads Sun's efforts with the Linux operating system, quietly left Sun
on Friday, the company confirmed today."" And the question is: How will this affect projects like OpenOffice release and the on-again, off-again McNealy Linux relationship.
Hello???
N . tml?pagewanted=print&position=bottom
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/02/technology/02SU
Zander to quit Sun in July (good bye, and good riddance)
Sun Linux boss quits (blah.)
...now with automatic URL filling and submit, like a real gateway should:
w . ytimes.com/2002/05/02/technology/02SUN.html&submit
http://www.majcher.com/nytview.html?url=http://ww
Also lm@neteng.engr.sgi.com (Larry McVoy) wrote: :-) The main reasons that Linux is faster than commercial Unices:
OK, I think I can handle this. Tell your friend that I used to work at SunSoft, in the kernel group, I did posix, ufs clustering, the sun source mgmt system, started 100baseT, architected the cluster product line (from which came vlans which I invented), etc. I think my credentials are probably enough to impress a sys admin
* the system call entry is a better design. All Unix systems other than Linux use the design done by Bell Labs 20 years ago and the Linux design is simply lighter - it approaches a procedure call in cost. The complaint is always that Linux can't possibly be supporting all the features, such as restartable system calls, if it is that fast. Those claims turn out to be false - Linux supports the same features, including security, as any commercial Unix. It's just designed better. And commercial Unices are starting to pick up the ideas.
* Linux kernel hacks count instructions and cache misses and eliminate them. This is a biggy. When each "feature" is added into a kernel, people will do gross measurement to show that it made no difference. And each feature doesn't make a measurable difference - one or two more cache misses in a code path won't show up. But do that a 100 times and all the "features" taken together start to hurt. Linux is far ahead of the rest of the world, including NT, in that Linus and the other senior kernel folks do not kid themselves that a cache miss here and there doesn't matter. I frequently see the Linux development effort keep working at it until the feature they are working on can not go faster because it is running at hardware speeds - there is no more room for optimization. Contrast that with the commercial approach of "well, it didn't slow down for me" and you can start to see how things get out of hand. Kudos to Linus, David and Alan for being the smartest coders in this regard. I'd like to be that good.
* Linux is a redesign. Many ideas have been rethought using current thinking. All other Unix implementations (exceptions are things like QNX - which also performs at Linux like speeds and has also been shown to be posix/xpg4 etc compliant) are basically the same under the covers. It isn't surprising that fresh minds can do better - one would hope that we have learned something in 20 years
http://www.ultralinux.org/faq.html#q_1_15
There are reasons Sun still uses its own processor: scalability, ECC on all interfaces, secondary diagnostic busses, and binary compatibility.
If the AMD Hammer can guarantee the same uptime that the UltraSPARC processors do, then you have a point, but, in general, there is more to a computer than just the CPU.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
I worked at Cobalt prior to the acquisition. I still work at Sun now, in the Cobalt group. SDW left on his 4 year anniversary with Cobalt, when all his options vested. No major mystery there. He's getting married and kicking back to enjoy his mega-bucks... all there is to it. Life at Sun (and Sun Cobalt) is progressing normally...