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SGI behind Linux: it's official

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the aint-that-cool dept.

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. "

2 of 45 comments (clear)

  1. Irix by jabbo · · Score: 3

    >>...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.
  2. That's wraps for IRIX by maynard · · Score: 3

    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?