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Linux Desktops Send NASA Rovers to Mars
joestar writes "It's not a secret that Linux has been used at NASA for a long time, and it appears that they have been using it quite extensively on the desktop. From the article: 'At the JPL, it is common to see Red Hat Inc., SuSE or Mandriva Linux running on users' desktops alongside Windows. [...] that's still a lot of Linux on the desktop.' More surprisingly, they seem to be reluctant to use Linux on servers: 'Our personal view is that Linux, period, is only for the desktop. We don't run our main servers on Linux, because there are too many flaws in main Linux kernel.'"
I have also seen Linux being used extensively by NOAA in the last few years for weather data tracking and forecasting. I run a combination of Linux, Mac and one XP PC in my lab at Texas A&M Agriculture Program where we run a network of crop-weather (Crop Weather Program for South Texas) stations and an extensive on-line decision support system for cotton growers along the Texas coastal plains. The servers are Linux along with my desktop and notebook, there are four Macs counting one notebook and one MS XP machine to run a Campbell Scientific application that communicates with the weather stations. If Campbell Scientific were to offer a Linux build of LoggerNet I would not need the XP box at all.
I lost my sig...
because there are too many flaws in main Linux kernel
Uhhm, compared to... what? Windows?
It's never just a game when you're winning. - George Carlin
Yes, that they've been using Unix and variants for decades, and while they may not feel confident of Linux on servers, they work in an environment where *nix is extremely common place, and very likely desirable as compared to alien operating systems like Windows.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I am currently an Intern at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. All I can say and from personal frustration, hate, and headaches, GSFC likes Sco. Need we say more about their Linux choices.
In physics and math departments at universities and national laboratories around the world it's not a strange thing to see people using Linux.
1993 according to this.
:-)
I quote:
During 1992 and 1993, the Linux kernel gathered all the necessary features it required to work as a replacement for Unix workstations, including TCP/IP networking and a graphical windowing system (the X Window System). Linux also received plenty of industry attention, and several small companies were started to develop and distribute Linux. Dozens of user groups were founded, and the Linux Journal magazine started to appear in early 1994.
Just one of several examples of doing a google search on Linux History. I personally have bene using Linux on my desktop and servers since I discovered Slackwarein 1996. (Thanks Patrick!
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
Oh, really?
So explain this guy (www.top500.org).
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this article is BS.
I've worked in mission control at JPL for several years and I've never seen Linux used as a Desktop OS by more people than I can count on one hand. In fact JPL has a contract with Lockheed Martin to supply Desktop computers that makes it very hard to run anything other than Windows or MacOS.
But, I have seen many workstations running Linux, and many servers running Linux. In fact, I think virtually all navigation is now done from Linux servers. And when workstations and Servers don't run Linux they run Solaris. There used to be some HPUX machines around, but you don't see many of them anymore after the crap HP put people through with HPUX-11 (what the hell was HP thinking by dropping fortran-77??)
Anyway this article is complete BS. Much like one MacWorld ran a while ago claiming JPL used Macs for everything.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Couldn't they?
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Linux (OK, OK, GNU/Linux) was meant as a Unix clone, and it is only natural that Linux has displaced Solaris, whatever Silicon Graphics was doing, and so on.
For people raised on the DOS/Windows culture, it is not as natural a progression. A lot of us (those doing lab computers for data collection, using computers for scientific computation, other academic pursuits) came to DOS and later Windows because . . . computers for this sort of thing (largely VAXes and later workstations) all ran Unix, and you had to have a big enough grant to afford not only the hardware but the Bearded Guru (TM) to keep such a system running. DOS and later Windows was in part a go-it-alone and do-it-yourself movement so the scientific luser community would have some financial and technical independence. While DOS/Windows came to require a guru culture of its own, a lot of us renegades acquired that expertise while we didn't know much Unix beyond ls, cat, hidden config files started with a dot, and VI has two modes: insert mode and beep mode.
The academic luser community could have adopted Linux as a go-it-alone replacement for big iron Unix, but for a variety of historical, cultural, and technical reasons, we went with DOS and Windows.
For the longest time, Microsoft was the "good guy upstarts" compared with the commercial Unix's. Microsoft acted tough with vendors and software developers crossing a certain threshold from the beginning, and the acting tough with users (product activation) is much more recent. But the academic luser community is stuck in the Windows world and is making toe-dipping attempt to try Linux out to break free, and it has been tough going.
But those NASA/JPL dudes running Linux come from people migrated from workstations I bet -- I would like to see an example of a luser community making a major effort to get going on Linux.
A few years ago, I had an internship at the Air Traffic Control lab at Ames Research Center in Mountain View (technically Moffet Field is its own city, but whatever), California. The people were nice and pretty good at what they did, and the desktops were mostly Red Hat, but the IT system there was pretty weird. I sat in a cubicle next to a one filled with unused desktop machines and monitors. Pentium 2/3, G3/G4 Macs, 17" CRTs, all kinda of stuff that was just 1.5-3 years old. Even so, people who were coming in would get new computers. Why? Because you can't just take one of the computers from the storage cubicle; you have to fill out forms and it needs to go through a bunch of processes to make sure that it works, that the hard drive is wiped, and a clean install of the OS is performed.
Obviously, the IT department would rather just open up a new machine than spend a bunch of effort refurbishing an old one, so they made the paperwork to have an old machine put back into service much more complicated than the paperwork to order a new machine. Furthermore, there was a tactical element involved: I ended up with a brand new, top of the line machine because my boss wanted one, but wasn't due for a new computer for a couple of years. If I remember correctly, because I was an intern, he was able to justify the purchase for 'a new employee' on the accounting side, while keeping the ownership rights from IT's perspective - so when I went back to school, he took the machine I'd been using and - you guessed it - dumped his old one in The Cubicle.
... when they have their own 'distro' designed for spacecraft:
http://flightlinux.gsfc.nasa.gov/
The biggest issue anyone could have with Linux is that it fucking breaks.
NASA has this dead on. When you're dealing with failures that can cost millions, the 2.6 kernel is simply not reliable enough. Hell, if you're dealing with failures that cost thousands, it's not reliable enough... and most server failures cost at least that much for midsize and larger companies. Downtime is really expensive. And you're entirely likely to have it with 2.6.
We in the open source community have this collective groupthink that Linux is extremely stable. It ISN'T, not anymore. 2.2 was incredibly robust... in my opinion, one of the best pieces of software ever written. 2.4 was problematic but eventually mostly stabilized... it still has occasional issues with unusual hardware combinations, but by and large it's pretty solid. 2.6, on the other hand, has been a complete nightmare from the point of view of pretty much any professional sysadmin. Constant regressions, constant bugfixes, and they won't fucking leave it alone and let it stabilize.
It takes YEARS to shake the bugs out of a piece of software, but they refuse to commit to backporting bugfixes to anything older than a couple of months. They just wave their hands in the air and expect 'the distros' to fix their coding errors, instead of doing it right in the first place. So everyone else has to scramble around and backport bugfixes, or else adopt a pile of new features every couple of months. Then we get the bugfixes for the new code, along with MORE new code, with yet MORE bugs. Rik van Riel has stated, I kid you not, that's he's perfectly okay with only one in three 'stable' kernels actually being, you know, stable.
So of COURSE NASA doesn't use it on servers. Linux is not being written for reliability. It never was, it just happened by accident. It was ALWAYS intended as a desktop Unix, but it was so amazingly robust in its early, simple incarnations, that it was pressed into wide server duty. And instead of realizing why Linux became so popular, the devs seem to have stayed with their desktop orientation... and in fact have changed the development process so it's more fun for them. It's a nightmare for everyone ELSE, but now they don't have to deal with the boring, nasty grunt work of making sure the code actually works in every single case.
I can't find the quote now, but at one time, Linus said something along the lines of "Hardware is inherently stable; there's no reason why software can't be written to the same standard." But he seems to have forgotten that completely. Linux has turned into the Windows of Unix.... lots and lots of features, not so hot on reliability. You KNOW it's a problem when Ars Technica, one of the most competent geek websites anywhere, switched back to Windows for _stability_. The Linux dev team should be completely ashamed of themselves for that one.
I've been using Linux since late 93 or early 94. I put it into real production service in business in '98 or so, and relied on it for years. All we had back then was ext2, which lost data if the box crashed... but it didn't matter much because it never crashed.
That is SO not true anymore.
Agree, for the most part. Personally, I don't use a new major kernel until the minor # reaches 10, just as kind of a minimal standard. Slackware shipped with 2.4 forever. In fact, I'm not sure it doesn't still do so. That should tell one something
I've been spending a lot of time at work lately working with machines that are running RedHat Enterprise Linux. At home I use my own variant of Linux From Scratch. In the past year or so, I've been noticing a surprising trend... My home machines (running stock kernel.org versions) are remarkably more stable than the machines at the office running RedHat's "stablelized" kernel.
In general, Linux vendors really need to make more of an effort in making sure that their kernels are as stable if not more so than the ones released on kernel.org... I have absolutely no faith that the programmers at RedHat/SuSe/YourLinuxVendor are able to do a better job with the kernel than Linus and the rest of the core kernel developers.
When I went and got a tour of JPL, from a staff member, not a tour guide, I looked in on their server clusters, they were running Fedora Core 4 smp. Now, perhaps this is just an isolated case, but everywhere I looked, there were computer's running Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows. When we got a tour of the main control room, where they had terminals displaying the data being received from the space probes/landers/craft, they were running linux. Therefore, I tend to doubt whoever said that the linux kernel wasn't 'stable' enough for their purposes. Perhaps they're just trying to keep Microsoft happy, because when I was there, it [Windows] certainly wasn't the majority OS.
JPL Visualization Supercomputer
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I agree that 2.2 was super stable and that 2.4 was less so. However, I've found that 2.6 is very stable. Certainly more that 2.4. A lot of stability issues come down to how you build your kernel. Build only what you need. Don't use things marked experimental. Research your kernel/hardware combination before hand.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
Bullocks. You can't opt out of massive low level SCSI rewrites. You can't opt out most of the stuff they're doing. The linux kernel dev team is going bonkers with changes, and seems to have completely lost touch with their most avid users: the early adopters who saw fit to install linux in skunkworks fashion to handle all manner of backend utility functions, despite the fact that it lacked many of the features belonging to it's proprietary brethren. Linux served them well because it was predictably stable, and easy to manage. Those people are now getting screwed. The kernel used to evolve more or less asymptotically to a pretty stable state. No longer. The 2.6 kernel is a reputation breaker. For the dev team and for the poor sysadmins who were trusting enough to advocate in favor of deploying it in their businesses. Linus' reputation as the uber software manager par excellance has taken a serious hit.
This is what Linus needs to do. Fire people. Clean house. Slackers who can't be bothered to clean up their messes because they're always too busy writing shiny new sloppy code should have their submission privileges revoked. Maybe even call 2.6 complete. Done. Finito. Then say that the only people who can submit to the next kernel revision are those who demonstrate a serious commitment to cleaning up 2.6. Let that process play out for six months or so, and then start 2.7. Go back to previous kernel numbering too.
Alan Cox, where art thou?!
I've noticed this too. Perhaps it's time for a fork. We need to get back to the release regime which used odd and even numbers to indicate stable and development. Yes, I do know the reasons for the change, but imho it just isn't working right. Using the 2.6.xy series is just like fiddling around with the 2.3 and 2.5 series, with the disadvantage that there is no 'stable' release into which the significant bug fixes can be backported. The old way might have resulted in more work, but there is now a financially supported OSDL full of helpers who can do that sort of drudgery.
...is as valid as "NASA" doesn't use Linux. JPL loves to be both "JPL" and "NASA" (the former for successes, the latter for failures), and frequently quotes come out of JPL which are attributed to "NASA", but are really specific to JPL/Caltech (or a sub-unit). Linux (and *nix) is there, and often in prominent places. NASA is big (not as big as DHS, but over 90k employees and ~250k systems). What is in use in one group may not be the same as another. Some field centers are more uniform than others, but the IT environment is really an incredibly diverse beastie. Think "one of everything", including what most would use solely as a space heater (if we had free electricity). Spacecraft design is frequently Windows-based due to limited engineering software choices feature-set (AutoCAD, et al) on the *nix side. Spacecraft data processing is frequently *nix-based. Simulations, visualizations, physics, wind tunnels, etc. are likewise (typically) *nix-based. The ODIN contract (outsourcing), which primarily provides end-user desktops/services is predominantly Windows-based, but also provides Macs and *nix systems at some locations.
For NASA OSS, Google "open source" site:nasa.gov. Or "linux" site:nasa.gov. Or...
With the work being done in the -rt patchset Linux is quickly developing into a world class RTOS. Today Linux runs the desktops, the next generation of rovers could run Linux for the control systems.
Re: the stability of 2.6, a lot of the increased churn is necessary if Linux wants to be viable on the desktop. Lots of key features that desktop users expect to Just Work are still not 100%, like wireless and suspend on laptops.
Servers are boring, if you want a rock-solid server just run Linux 2.4.