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Linux Supporting G5 Liquid Cooling System

Posted by pudge on from the cooooooooool dept.

Sandor writes "Apple's G5 is selling well and this seems to have helped the development of the Linux kernel on the ppc64 platform: shortly after the shipment of the dual G5 with the new liquid cooling system, it seems that Linux kernel is going to support it really soon."

8 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The point by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Cross platform compatibility. If you have an application for which you have the source code, it's advantageous to be able to run the OS on an arbitrary hardware platform. Whether that hardware be Alpha, MIPS, Sparc, POWER, PowerPC, x86, 6502, or whatever, if the OS will run on it, it's a relatively minor thing to take the source code and recompile (assuming it doesn't have endian problems or embedded assembly).

    This means that if you can get better bang for your buck out of PowerPC (aka Xserve RAID) hardware, you'll buy Xserves, throw the OS onto it, and start plugging away with your app. Next week, the best bang for buck might be Alpha -- so you buy the relevant systems from HP, throw the OS onto them, and start plugging away. The following week, it might be x86.

    Yes, in theory, any POSIX platform should be sufficiently compatible to do the job. In practice, however, POSIX compliance isn't enough.

    If you want OS X, it's there. If, however, your app is written for Linux (and it's the only app you want to run, or the others are all written for Linux) -- why bother modifying it so it'll work on OS X if it'll work with just a recompile on the PowerPC Linux ports?

    If you don't believe that the Unix market is so divergent, then I dare you: try downloading and compiling all the sources, from scratch, for some major package -- maybe KDE -- on Solaris. Or Tru64. Or HP-UX. Or AIX. It might work on Linux, but you'll have a royal pain of a time trying to get it to work elsewhere, unless it's been carefully written to not use Linux-isms. Believe me, I've been there, and it's not pretty.

  2. Re:VNC? by Zachary+Kessin · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Well i use both to be honest. VNC has a few major features I like. For one thing I can get a full KDE Or Gnome Desktop. I can also shut down the mac and leave the KDE session running. I can also move the session between any of several screens.

    On the minus side the way I have things right now I only have 15 bit color over VNC, when I tried to put it to 24 bit mode it gave me very strange colors.

    --
    Erlang Developer and podcaster
  3. not hardware controled!? by bjarthur123 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    do i understand correctly that the fans and liquid-cooling system are not controlled by hardware? so if your OS crashes or otherwise malfunctions, then your CPU could overheat? does this seem like a really bad way to engineer things to anyone else?

  4. Re:The point by nathanh · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Not to troll...but what is the point of running Linux on the Mac, aside from the "because we can!" which is a valid reason. :-)

    Because I prefer Linux (honest) and Apple's hardware is really nice. Fortunately I can get the best of both worlds. Viva LinuxPPC.

  5. Re:The point by rb4havoc · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You say that, but I've been using a Mac since the late 80s, and whenever I went to install Linux recently on my PowerBook, I had some diehard Linux users ask me why I wanted to do that. Apparently they think OS X is better...

    --
    "There are 10 types of people in this world--Those that understand binary, and those that do not..."
  6. Why? by amichalo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    is this like those other times when people have gotten linux running on their Palm or Xbox or clock radio?

    I am not trying to flame but I just don't see the point - OS X is BSD. You've got X11. you can run all sorts of apps from the OS X command line (from apache to fink to vi) so what's the appeal of running linux?

    All I coud figure is the desktop environment.

    --
    I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
    1. Re:Why? by amichalo · · Score: 2, Interesting

      okay, I'll give your #2 a bit of validity, but as for #1, this article is about Linux on the liquid cooled dual processor G5 - so saying Linux is useful for a box that can barely run OS X won't apply to this box.

      as for #2 - is the Linux interface (KDE, Gnome, watver) so 'familiar' and impressive that someone would take all the time to port the OS to PPC? I mean, I have used Linux in various forms for several years, though only ever as dual boot, and I must say that savge Redhat 9, I thought the distributions had pretty poor interfaces, just look/feel/navigation wise, compared to Windows, which itself is so very, very bad.

      Oh well, guess it comes down to personal preference.

      --
      I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
    2. Re:Why? by mdarksbane · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Yeah, interface is all about preference. Personally, I agree with you, but I've been using macs as my preferred platform for years.

      I don't think it's mostly about the graphical interface, though. It's more the command line stuff, and the programs you're used to having. Sure, a lot of them are available for OS X, but not all, and often not in quite as nice of a form, or the configuration files being where you're used to them, and working how you want. I'd say it's the same reason people prefer Linux's various interfaces over windows. I honestly don't think Gnome or KDE is even as polished as windows, but they aren't the entirety of the interface. That way you interact with the machine on the command line and configuration files are part of it, too.

      That said, clustering and fitting the machine into your existing server network are two other reasons. I'd bet that you can get a version of linux that'll make that G5 run certain tasks faster than OS X does. In that case, interface doesn't really matter, as long as you can set it up to begin with. OS X isn't as specifically at scientific applications as some versions of PPC linux.