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SGI behind Linux: it's official
Cornel Ciocîrlan writes "SGI announced yesterday that it will support Linux as its fourth operating system. The press release talks about contributions to the open-source community in the area of high-performance file systems, OpenGL, high-bandwidth I/O, compilers and other scalability features. "
Ok lets face it, obviously most of you reading this are younger and NOT working in LARGE hardware manufacturers shops. Good software that scales well and is robust takes a hell of a lot of time.
SGI is probably hard at work porting stuff.
I see from a few web sites that the 320 VW runs
linux 2.2.5 pretty good. ^_^
Lets face it, Linux is NOT ready for serious
HARD CORE production work at the same level as the
Solaris's and Irix's of this world. A few examples you say? Async IO. I wouldn't bother
with databases until this happens in the kernel.
Sgi(should this be capatilized now?) or IBM could
bring this to the table. No journaled LARGE file
support. ext2fs and xiafs,et al are all well and good, but something like SGI's new cxfs would
be absolutely phenomenal for beowulfs!! clustered
file systems are the future. Especially with
larger sites moving to SAN and failsafe solutions.
"But XXX!" you say. "There are plenty of places
using Linux in production work!" Yes, but where is the money for an IBM or an SGI? SGI's big install base was the Indigo2. A kickass desktop 10 years ago. Now they do scalable FAST servers and cling to the remnants of super-computing, while trying to revive the low end with NT and Linux. No margin, what value-add with a linux
box? Has sgi EVER been easily affordable?
Sgi has a lot of cool products I'd LOVE to see
go OpenSource. (performer, cxfs,failsafe,nqe,
4dwm,etc... But I bet we'll only see older
versions like xfs instead of cxfs. That'll still
rock! Sgi backed out of selling the secrets of
Cellular Irix to Mr. Gates & co. perhaps
they'll bring decent SMP and excellent scalability. (ala' ASCII Blue Mountain anyone?)
They are planning 256p machine sales now. Why
not make their future clusters on Intel with Linux? Granted a lot of kernel work will have to
go on again.
A buddy of mine sez that the first Linux only
boxes from SGI are ALREADY out in the field!!
the 1400L or somthing. IBM is still trying to
get their first linux only up and going...
And where is SUN and HP?
And yes I do know WAY more about this then I'm saying, but I am covered by a DEC, an AT&T, a
SUN and SGI non-disclosure agreements. This stuff
is all public or conjecture.
A unix guy..
>>...if SGI decides to hold close it's dead IRIX >>technology the community will lose a very good
;-))
>>scalable operating system.
With sieve-like security and a tiny user base. I used to use Irix and loved it, but come on... the world keeps on spinning. Cellular Irix will probably show up on the ultra-high-end; go get yerself a O2K, maaan. As for the midrange, who cares? Linux scales as well as Irix on an O2...
I'm overjoyed that SGI is bringing in the heavy I/O artillery for Linux. Unless you really despise all us unwashed Linux users, you should be too. AOL will probably be enough (by themselves) to drive Irix *support*, but maybe not *development*, especially on the low end. (AOL runs AOLserver on O2Ks with Sybase as the main backend; they're keeping all 3 of these in business by my estimation
Incidentally, Irix goes to 128-way on the big CC-NUMA systems. It effortlessly did 20-way on our (straight SMP) Onyx when I was at Cornell... I don't disagree that it rules, but try explaining that to a PHB that thinks GUI hooks in a server OS kernel are Modern.
They OSS'ed OpenVault, why wouldn't they do the same (or similar) with XFS? Well, methinks they may take the opportunity to engineer something better. I went and bought the Be book on Filesystem Design when I realized the level of flexibility the VFS gives you. It's pretty cool.
Anyways, SGI == I/O and we should all rejoice. The chances of NT retaining a lead in brute-force I/O (which is a big, big hangup for Linux in the scalability/multithreaded department) should now be slim-to-none. Hah, Hah... and we all thought SGI had sold out. Maybe they just pulled an IBM.
Long Live SGI.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
Oh well, even though they're not announcing it, I guess we should assume that IRIX is officially dead. If they're not porting IRIX to Intel, and they're certainly not going to continue developing their MIPS hardware line after spinning MIPS, Inc. off last year, then what's going to happen to that IRIX source tree?
What a shame. IRIX and Solaris are the only serious scalable UNIXen on the market. HP-UX and AIX really only scale up 16 processors, Digital UNIX even less so, while IRIX and Solaris can handle a good 64 processors with a reasonable backplane. This means that if SGI decides to hold close it's dead IRIX technology the community will lose a very good scalable operating system.
Betcha the admins over at world.std.com are frowning over this... A good consolation prize might be freeing the source for XFS. Who thinks SGI might be willing to take such a drastic course of action?