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SGI Hiring 5+ Linux Kernel Hackers
cybrthng writes "Well, according to some adds on linuxtoday and also via SGI's SGI Employment Opportunities Webpage You can search under technical/engineering jobs and sure enough they're looking for a few good men to develop linux for SGI :) "
Nice to see them start to make a bigger play in the Linux
arena. I'm hearing cool rumors from over there- let's hope
they're better then the name change...
3dfx is a monopolistic company that will NOT Emprace open source. They wanted some developers for closed source drivers.
SGI is looking for people to make the opensource support for their system better. They are also donating a TON of their own technology to the Kernel and X projects including GL and its companian technology, SMP work, etc.
In short OpenSource people LIKE what SGI is trying to do. People don't like companies who release Binary only drivers like 3dfx.
On a personaly note OpenSource is why I run linux not Solaris 7 (now that it's free for non-comercial use) or *BSD.
I've been talking to SGI engineers and marketing
people every week or so for the last several
months, and I am impressed that they are moving
strongly in the right direction. They've made
a considerable amount of progress on a volunteer
basis; to get their new VW (Intel) box running
Linux. Last I heard from them is that they were
going to hire a couple of engineers full time.
The way that I see it, is that SGI has a fairly
simple decision to make; are they interested in
all of their previous customers (like me) or not?
Current (and former) SGI users would prefer Linux
to NT; but it is true that the SGI userbase is
sadly small. Still, the growth of Linux, at
the apparent expense of NT, seems to have shown
management at SGI the light.
This announcement that they want to hire 5 people
is further news that they are even more aggressive
than I had thought. Great.
This, along with the funding of Precision Insight
to write a direct rendering infrastructure for
Linux, shows that SGI gets it. Note, too, that
Precision Insight has just hired Daryll Strauss
of Digital Domain (who did, in his spare time,
the full-screen OpenGL for Voodoo cards under
Linux) to further their work. They're looking
for more people, too...check out
http://www.precisioninsight.com
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
The difference here is that all the work that SGI does to the kernel has to be made available to the rest of the linux community. 3Dfx wanted help making drivers which they could release as binary only if they wanted to. So the situations are not the same. If you read the job description you will see that the position "includes presentation and promotion of the solutions to be accepted in the open community where necessary."
---
Yeah, you will probably not be writing fluffy
code that you're used to in VB; I
think they need serious
kernel hackers to address sgi-specific hardware
stuff and OpenGL integration (hopefully).
I doubt they'd go for Linux on MIPS; why throw
away all that IRIX devel? I'm sure this is
for their VPC line. Probably want to get some
driver support into the Linux kernel for the
sgi cobalt video chipset and take advantage of
the UMA.
--- witty signature
I hope they'd consider female applicants too.
It's true that there may not be many female kernel hackers to go around, but it's insidious inadvertant slips like this that contribute to the situation, and that's bad for all of us.
I've just had a talk with a SGI rep here (we have an Origin200) and he said SGI is preparing an open-source release of XFS (like they did with GLX).It might be a few months away though...
XFS is the journaling filesystem used by IRIX. IRIX with XFS has some unique features like "guaranteed rate I/O". I wonder if they'll port this to Linux.
If you don't know what XFS is good for, recovering an 18 Gb XFS filesystem after power failure takes a few seconds ! No more waiting for fsck... Less downtime...