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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."

3 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. 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?

  3. 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.