Slashdot Mirror
'Black Lab' Linux For G3 Clusters
ChristianC writes "'Black Lab' Linux, a relative of Yellow Dog Linux, has been released for PowerPCs (including G3s and iMacs). The distribution offers Beowulf and Cluster computing - 20 G3s at once!
"
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
Has anyone tried this out yet? It'd be great to see some comparative benchmarks to a similar Beowulf cluster. My bet is that the G3's kick but!
Don't you guys think that the built in monitors for imacs make them non-ideal for a beo. cluster? Why would you need 20 monitors to go with your 20 mobo's? Once you get them going you don't need to have screens on each do you?
Also, I don't think that the same people who are interested in a beo. would really care how pretty the imac looks or how easy it is to use.
Note that the next Debian version (potato) will support PPC, adding one of the experienced / established distributions to the PPC list.
iMacs are the prettiest things in the world. Anyone who says "someone that buys a computer based on it's looks and not its performance is stupid," and refers to iMacs needs to wake up. What is the difference between a 400mhz intel and a 400mhz ppc processor, WHO CARES, they are both fast. Besides that, intel users have no right to cut down any other system for quality.
# grep -v "*" asm-i386/bugs.h | wc -l
290
then check out asm-ppc/bugs.h.
"There are cool cases for PCs now too." No there aren't. There may be some "different" (intel's latest vomit-worthy creations), but that's just the case for the CPU. When you've got a keyboard that has the same style as the mouse, that has the same style as the monitor, that has the same style as the cpu (G3s included), that has the same style of MANY other products available, like printers, you've uniformity, which is a nice thing. "Different" CPU case, beige monitor, white mouse with red on it, black keyboard, scary printer, oh come on, like how it looks means nothing.
I can't wait to be able to afford an iMac and run Debian GNU/Linux PPC on it. Then I can laugh at everyone else in the world that uses the other crap (no SPARCs, SGIs, systems like that aren't ugly).
HAVE FUN.
- My Two cents.
MacOS is like driving with the gas pedal down all the way and controlling your speed with the brake.
But linux runs nice on the powerpc macs...
Hmmm, I think that 'Lab' is actually 'Labrador' truncated ;-)
Woof!
~AC
Alert: ANECDOTE AHEAD: I have a 350 mhz G3 and a 350 mhz AMD k6-2 and I "admin" a 350 mhz PII. I am fairly stunned at how much faster some software runs on the G3. Like Unreal, for example. Blows the PII away. UHHH -WaYYYYyyyyyyyeeeee..(the G3 has a bit more ram @ 192mb vs 128mb both for the PII and AMD boxes, but none enjoy a SCSI advantage over the other) The AMD has a TNT which will migrate to the PII soon, but I doubt that will make Unreal as smooth on it as it on the G3. Maybe your problem running apps on the G3s is that the PPC compiler you're using is crap? Maybe you'd rather make a blanket statement about G3s and MacOS instead of finding out why you're stuff is slow because you disapprove of Apple's politix? BTW: Were you forcing yourself to support both the 68k and ppc platforms when you wrote your code?
I'd like to see Apple join OSS, but really it doesn't make market sense for them to do so. They exist by lock-in. OSS would hurt them. Speaking of OSS on ppc, they are going to have to get busy and write some better compilers and figure out how to stay current on the hardware if they want to compete against OSX. I don't expect Apple to be handing out the needed info anytime soon.
And along the same line, is it even possible to boot these new G3's minitowers without monitors attached? I recall the older models not being bootable headless at all...
Black Lab will be based on Champion 1.1 :)
-Dan
Terra Soft Solutions, Inc.
dburcaw@yellowdoglinux.com
Odd. My University has G3s (beige, 266) and PIIs (Dells, 266). RAM is 64 megs on each. Both arrived about the same time late last summer.
Performance wise, I see them as equivalent. Some programs run faster on the PII, some run faster on the Macs.
If you suspect something is a lot slower, maybe there is something else going on: misconfiguration, lack of RAM, etc. Or maybe you are comparing one particular program. re iMacs, 32 megs ain't enough.
They're building the entire system for you, not just giving you the software. The only configurations that they offer are clusters of Blue G3's at different speeds, with an optional iMac as a control panel.
I too have objections to Apple, especially having been a NEXTSTEP/OpenStep developer and observing what Apple Enterprise has done with NEXTSTEP...
.mot.com/WebOS/omf/GSS/MCG/products/boards/ppcmtx. html.
However, LinuxPPC has excellent potential and I'm glad to see Yellow Dog continuing with its plans.
There are alternate sources of PPC components - Motorola manufactures a line of CHRP/PReP-compliant ATX logic boards (in both single and dual CPU) based on the 604: http://www.mcg
They accept readily industry-standard PCI components and are based on the standard ATX form-factor, thus making a nice fit with the plethora of generic rack-mount chassis on the market (the company I work for runs PowerMAX on these).
It would be nice to see third-parties integrate systems based on this hardware - with demand, the price of this equipment will go down as it has with third-party DEC Alpha and Sparc systems.
Inexpensive and superior third-party non-Apple PowerPC equipment would be a boon to LinuxPPC, as it has been for Linux-Alpha and Linux-Sparc.
~AC
i run linux on a mac, currently a heavily modded yellow dog linux system, which i chose because it's glibc2 stable out of the box. i don't know if i can argue with you, or respond with irate replies, either. i agree that we're an odd little slice of the computer population. i even think that's a good thing. linux/i386 used to be that way, for example, before it went largely mainstream (with redhat).
one of the more interesting (and annoying) things about linux/ppc is that to my knowledge, all of the distros offered are red hat based. this will change with Debian (potato?), which i'm looking forward to very much. i also understand that there are people building a slackware-style distro for ppc.
alex
If you mean the main Linux Kernel, I doubt it will go in, since it's quite a bit of additional code, not to mention the complexity. (Trust me, it's a real pain track down where all your processes have migrated to when something is broken)
troy@blacklablinux.com
Check out mklinux.org. MkLinux development was taken over by the MkLinux community itself, after Apple (and the OSF, yes they dumped the MkLinux community, too) stopped working on it.
FWIW, I've run mkLinux and PPC linux on a 7200, 8500, and my iMac. The 7200 running mkLinux has been running apache, bind, and sendmail for about 3 years very reliably.
The user experience or running linux on a mac is similar to my sgi. Setup is easier since the hardware is standardized - video, scsi, etc...Mac hardware has been pretty reliable for me.
One problem is that some vendors (eg ORACLE) haven't released ppc versions of their product.
Clear Netscape's cache on all the machines.
geez bruce, cant you get anything right. as punishment we require you to watch the first 3 seasons of the X-Files! hopefully this will teach you a lesson! :)
Show "The Little Mermaid" on the monitors; lease the MIPS behind them to some aspiring nuclear power.
Well, I guesss I'm a little odd because I run LinuxPPC on an old 7200/75, but it's my only computer and man the MacOS crashes a lot. Back when I was running OS8, the computer went down at least three or four times a day. Since I went Linux a year ago, only one crash. So there are reasons. If I were doing it over, I'd probably pick a PC and use linux on that, since I'm getting sick of editing the kernel source just to get my machine to boot.
Not an easy feat to secure a Mac against hairless monkeys. Either you run some hacked together software (eg MacAdministrator-which is not fully compatible w/ OS8.5), crappy crippleware (AtEase), Netboot (what kind of performance will that give?), or leave 'em OPEN. Macs are NOT multiuser, they aren't even multiple user single-user systems (like NT). There is no (built in) log in screen. All users are ROOT unless you run a hack to prevent access. Any such hack will by nature have to do some serious messing with the OS. Who knows what sort of performance/stability impact that will have.
At some things my Blue G3/350/1MB seems slower than my PMMX-200(NT4). At some things my 7100/66 (that's a PPC 601) seems faster than that same PMMX-200. That's the magic of running different OSs on different hardware compiled by different compilers.
If I were doing it over, I'd probably pick a PC and use linux on that, since I'm getting sick of editing the kernel source just to get my machine to boot.
I don't know why you're having to edit kernel source. I've been using linux/ppc for over a year now, and the only thing I've had to futz with was the infamous libc5 header problem, and that's certainly not kernel source. Everything else has compiled out of the box, for the most part, for me. Of course, I'm using the 2.2.x tree, but let's face it, if you're using anything but current, stable kernels, you have no right complaining about having to edit the source.
alex
this guy really screwed over the linuxppc guys. don't trust him.
All Macs are bootable with 0, 1, ..., n displays attached.
(actually, that last bits not quite true, the Mac II in 1987 was the first Mac that supported multiple monitors)
I have a Quadra 700 serving as the NAT router for my home network, sans-monitor (running IPNetRouter). It was just laying around so I thought I'd put it to work.
where some of these long-standing misconceptions about Macs come from I'll never know...
One could get a comperable reliabilty factor with systems from a major PC vendor, etc, or buying a cluster in rack mount cases, but then the cost is comperable.
Not in my experience.
I have access to a Beowulf comprised of rackmount dual PII/400s with 1GB of memory and 18GB SCSI disk each. The per-node cost (sans the cost of the Myrinet and SCI cards) was about US$5k in January. A similarly specced G3 (single 400MHz PPC, 1GB memory, same SCSI disks, again without Myrinet or SCI) was about US$7k in March. The G3 and the dual PII came out about even on single-CPU FP performance (both ~80 MFLOPS using Linpack 100), but the dual PII showed a factor of 2 greater single-CPU memory bandwidth (300MB/s on the dual PII vs. 150MB/s on the G3 using stream_d). This was under OSX Server, so Linux might perform better on this hardware. I'm not convinced it's worth the cost premium though.
Actually, there was a problem with the code for the 2.2 kernel when it came out that prevented 7200's from booting. You had to edit a head.S file, as I remember, or the computer would hang immediately after rebooting. This may have been resolved in later versions, but compiling a kernel every other day on a 75 Mhz machine isn't a good use of my time.
What can i say? Macs keep value. I used my IIcx (purchased 1989) up till last year when the cheap hard drive i put in died out. so when the usefullness of a G3 cluster comes to an end (like upgrading to a new g4 cluster with the new motherboard design apple is supposed to be working on;-) you can just take them out and use them for other stuff.
How can you say that a G3 with a Seagate Cheetah (ultra2 wide of course) is not fast enough for a disk system.
How can you say that a G3 with an 100Mbit card is any slower than what you can get with Linux for the x86?
What you forget is that we are not comparing the MacOS to windows here. We are comparing Linux on x86 to Linux on PPC. There is a big difference between these two comparisons. If you really say that bandwidth and harddrive speed are at the crux of the situation, then you are truly mistaken to claim that one should never use PPC hardware. There simply is no difference!!!
Another thing, aren't we looking at Black Lab as a Beowulf cluster???? This mean we are doing processor intensive computations... not web serving. Geese, the short sighted among us are quite rampant these days. Who thought someone would get a webserver and a Beowulf cluster mixed up... I guess you are one of those spoil-sports who grew up with Windows 3.1 and wished you had a Mac Plus instead, but never could step down to purchasing one because you would lose your pulpit and your MS Coat of Arms that you relish so much. HmmmpffF
Speed? Processor speed is virtually irrelevant in Internet serving, as bandwidth and disk access are the gating factors.
Why make this comment? The purpose of making this type of cluster is for high-performance computing, not for the Internet.
Mr. Geller used to write for MacUser. Perhaps he quit when it became apparent that his services were no longer needed when MacUser and MacWorld merge into one publication. Perhaps he jumped ship when he first smelled a rat. Once a ZDNet writer, always a ZDNET writer.
Moderators, hack away at my comments.:-)
OSX server uses gcc-2.7.2 as it's compiler base.
;) compiler is *much* better. I compared egcs-1.0 to gcc-2.7.2 about a year ago (on a 266 G3 running linux) and egcs was 20% faster. I suspect the current one might be better, but I make no guarantees.
The latest EGCS (soon to be gcc again
Do you have any idea what made the memory bandwidth of the PII so much better? Both machines are using 100 mhz SDRAM, so the memory BW should be identical. If not, something was wrong with OSX server's memory handling.
(mail me if you have any more comments)
troy@blacklablinux.com
I was reading through Apple's documentation on Quicktime 4 and got a kick out of the fact that they still support the 68020 (a touch better than i286 class performance)
Now granted you won't be able to run the Sorenson codec on it (hehe, waiting 2-3 minutes per frame just isn't suitable for viewing)
Tom
It's a kernel DAMMIT!
I agree fully with the above post. I am a recent grad in electrical engineering and I would not likely fit into the average Mac user stereotype. During my years in college I have used several Unix variants and would consider myself proficient in the use of the command line. However I have not administrated a *nix box before and am now attempting to do so with LinuxPPC. I chose to use the Mac over other operating systems since at the time (and still so, to my knowledge) the university had a large number of Macs in use in the math and engineering departments. Those computers that were not Macs was split evenly between Windows and some Unix variant. I didn't like the Windows interface and felt unwilling to spend $2000+ on a computer with such a crappy GUI.
I have seen a similar effect in a higher level of computer literacy in Macintosh owners vs. Windows owners. I would tend to attribute this to one of two possibilities. The first being that more informed/discerning user would choose the Mac over Windows on technical or interface merits, were a less informed person would simply buy what's popular. The second possibility is that those that use a Mac at home (or dorm room) and are presented with Windows computers in the classroom and workplace are forced to deal the the limitations/differences/merits of either OS. This exposure gives them ample opportunity to self teach computer concepts that one that is only exposed to one OS (usually being just Windows) would not have.
(rant) When I mention that I use a Mac at home in a group of Windows users I am usually treated as if I'm some kind of computer dummy. They are talking about some kind of software/hardware problem on their computer and I offer advice, I am ignored or berated for thinking I might have something useful to offer. These people do not realise that just because I use a Mac does not make me a computer illiterate. I have been troubleshooting computer problems since I was in the fourth grade and I am now employed because of my computer skills. Because of such experiences I tend to look down on Windows users. (/rant)
IMHO the Mac users that I've met and hold on to their Macs during the dark times of 95-97 are among the most competent people I know. Not computing wise perse but in a whole lot of other areas.
These people want to finish work in stead of saving 300 dollars on hardware.
A completely fucked up Mac is up and running about 20 minutes flat. New OS, new apps. No joke.
The savings of Intel hardware are pretty much moot here. And no, I know, Linux or NT never die, yeah sure.
Keeps their value?
Bah. I have a 20th Annv. Mac. (The Machines Apple was selling at 7,000. And closed 'em out at 2,000) I bought it to run Rhapsody.
That was the value (to me) it was to have.
But because the macine was not the idea of cartoon maker Steve Jobs, support for it under Rhaspody is gone.
The iMac is a toy, when you compaire it to a 20th Annv. Mac.
x86 CPUs have a stack orientated FPU, PPCs (like every better CPU) not.
Al of us who got macs won't buy a PC just to test linux, we will trie it on our macs.
More distributions for mac = good thing
One other possible problem is that the BMAC+ driver still needs a bit of work. The original BMAC driver is a bit better written (under Linux). But, I plan on looking over the docs and poking the BMAC+ driver (different chips/company then the 1st one) and see if I can't push the performace up a bit.
- Tom
Well. Part of this reason is quite frankly the Windows SETI@home client is slow. My dual P2/333s under Linux complete SETI@home blocks ~4 times faster then a friend of mine w/ a P2/350 in windows. And since there's no SETI@home client for Linux/PPC (yet) there's no really fair benchmark.
Does Black Lab Linux raid the cat litter box, the way a real black lab dog will?
Dogs are really smart animals.
It's also fair to say that an individual who buys a Mac shouldn't have to pay forever for the mistake. Making Linux available to said individual helps rescue him/her from the fate of forever running a Mac.
The 603 and the G3 have the same FPU, which is inferior to the FPU on the 601/604 and the coming G4. As a FPU, the 603/G3 FPU is significantly inferior to the PII FPU, but the G3 chip has significant speed advantages over the PII elsewhere in the chip. When the G4 arrives, there will be no doubt about who is the fastest, and there will be a window of at least 2 years before Intel can come close to matching speed with the PPC family.
Most complaints about PPC speed are because of using standardMicrosoft software packages in school computer labs, and Microsoft has deliberately slowed this down so as not to make the Windows machines running the same software look bad. If you stay away from MS software, the PPC's are almost always faster than PC's, sometimes vastly so. I'm anxious for our next Mac upgrade on our lab computers where I teach, and would love to build a cluster when they arrive.
The Linux PPC tends to lag 6 months to a year behind the i386x Linux. I've heard that IBM is working on arrangements to have somebody (RedHat???) cure this, so that the latest and greatest (e.g., lib6) apps will run on the PPC variant of linux.
For 'desktop' use, power consumtion issues alone are a good reason not to use Linux. The usual Linux distribution is very server-oriented, with cron jobs scheduled by default to run late at night. The whole architecture of the OS is designed for use in machines that are on 24/7. This is very wasteful in 'desktop' environments (say, at home) for people who use the machine maybe 4-5 hours a day tops.
Then you have people who carry on constantly about their long 'uptime' statistics. This is very important in a server environment, where a machine needs to be available to many different people. It's a big power-waste for single-user machines (the Linux 'desktop' that only zealouts advocate).
Linux is a very un-Green operating system.
Terrible? I have a Rev A iMac (233 MHz) and a Dell Optiplex GX1p with a 450 MHz PIII. I have yet to see any appreciable performance difference between them. (Admitedly, the Dell is hobbled by running NT 4.0, and the iMac is running MacOS 8.1. It would be interesting to load Linux on both of them and compare. Hmmm, spare partition begging for a Linux instal...) The only things in the Dell's favor are a larger monitor and greater expandability via PCI and SCSI. Wonder if those Formac SCSI cards for the Mezzenine slot are still available from Bottom Line?
However, I would admit that iMacs, having integrated monitors, would not be well suited for a Beowulf setup. The regular B&W G3's however, should be screamers in such an environment, especially using 1Gb ethernet as the interconnect.
BTW, I refuse to refer to Beowulf as "clustering"--it is not. Beowulf is distributed parallel computing. I'll agree that it is clustering when they have proper equivalents to MSCP disk serving (lower-level and far more robust than NFS), MCR SYSMAN, and a proper Distributed Lock Manager built into the kernel (required for the aforementioned MSCP disk serving). Not trying to start a flame war or anything, but those of us from an OpenVMS background are pretty annoyed by such flagrant misuse of the term "clustering."
I don't think it's so much to do with small bugs like the ICMP bug in Linux 2.2, or the "CGI crashes machine" bug in OSX, the real problem with OSX is that it's only been out for a few months. Relatively few people have been using it (sure, I know its ancestors have been in use for quite a while, but as a complete product it has only been available for a very short time). If I went out and bought a copy of OSX, I would certainly expect there to be a large number of bugs. (I would expect the GUI to work well, but I bet there are plenty of little gotchas in the Unix portion) The advantage of using a free operating system with a user base like Linux or NetBSD is that at least I know the bugs will get fixed very quickly. (not to mention I can fix them myself if need be)
yellow dog linux is selling a hardware/software linux/ppc distributed solution. they're just using the stuff they've downloaded off the net themselves, and probably aren't doing a hell of a lot of modification of it. if you want to run beowulf, go to www.beowulf.org and download it yourself.
oh, and linux distributions are not, iirc, required to be available for download free. all pieces of a distribution that are GPL'd (the kernel, most of the standard *nix utils, X, etc) must be distributed with source. that's the GPL. but there's nowhere that says that "all linux distributions must be freely available for download, in their entirety."
Last I checked LinuxPPC supported USB mouse and keyboard.
> I find it rather disturbing, it seems everyone here is so x86 centric.
I'm not. At work I use ultrasparcs, alphas, whatever. But at home I have an x86 box. Sure, I'd like to use a G3 box- but even if it's twice as fast, a system based on an x86 clone chip (AMD) is going to be four times cheaper than a PowerMac. I simply can't afford to pay the markup for an assembled system, x86-based or Apple.
The fact is, you can probably buy a 533MHz Alpha system these days for about $1500 (including mobo, RAM, CPU, hard disk, and case). What kind of pricing can you get on a comparable powermac?
In most educational labs I've been in where Macs are used, they are left at their default settings.
Under OS 8 this means:
No virtual memory
Small disk cache
Slow mouse *
Under > OS 8 this means:
Virtual memory [it loads libraries dynamically rather that statically without VM on, it decreases RAM usage rather dramatically]
Larger disk cache
Slow mouse *
Now, I think the reason Mac OS *feels* slower is that generally mouse tracking is set to the slow, default speed. Try increasing your mouse's tracking speed -- on any platform -- and there's a FEELING that the OS is running faster. Stick Win95 on a 386, pump up the mouse tracking, and until you click something it feels faster.
You can run MkLinux on Nubus based PPC machines. Check out http://www.mklinux.org. The MkLinux development team has been VERY active lately, and they are working on a release for Linux 2.2 kernel that is in sync with the LinuxPPC Release 5.
Eric Bronnimann
All 604e motherboards use fast-page memory running at 40-60mhz. All G3 motherboards use 66-100mhz sdram. Thus, the G3 has the superior motherboard.
Now for a real-world yet strange comparison. My faovrite stats packkae, SAS's SuperANOVA, was never ported to PPC. To run it, you need to use PowerFPU, which maps the 68k fpu calls to the PowerPC chip.
Now, comparing the speeds of my PowrCenterPro 210 (210mhz 604e, 64k L1 cache, 1meg L2@60mhz, 60 mhz fpm dram) vs. my Powerbook G3 (250mhz G3, 64k L1, 1 meg L@125 mhz, 83mhz sdram), the 604e blows the G3 away. In fact, it is repeatedly 3-times faster for this task. That 32-bit fpu on the G3 (vs. 64-bit on the 604e) must be one helluva bottleneck.
For this, and several other reasons, I will hold off buying a new desktop until the G4's arrive.
I got similar results until I tried BlockMoveDataUncached(). It makes a helluva difference. It also makes you wonder how relevant stream_d really is.
dumbass
NetBSD also supports USB mouse, keyboard, iMac. ;>
http://www.NetBSD.org/
and what OS is Green ?
:-)).
.., halt -p to shut down the computer safely
Linux and NetBSD include kernel support to turn off power consumption for the CPU and sleep when the CPU is idle. No Windows 98 doesnt..? CPU uses more energy under Windows 98 and therefore runs hotter (get a bigger cooler dude or install add-on applications such as Rain..or another, might be a hack and might cost ya
In my experience I had Windows 98 crash when I tried to suspend, this has never happened since switching to NetBSD apmd, zzz to suspend the works, e.g. monitor, harddrives
Yeah.
mkLinux is a prime example of the variety of the Linux world. In mkLinux the Linux kernel runs as a server on top of the mach3 microkernel. You can run multiple Linux servers (or other servers) simultaneously on one machine. It's probably one of the most different linux distros around.
And mkLinux is trying to update the x86 parts of their sources. It has been languishing for the past couple of years, but hopefully someone will get it up to date now.
Please help and contribute to the mkLinux project. i understand they need volunteers for porting drivers and updating the x86 sources! Join them.
www.sheepshaver.com
I wish they'd hurry up!
Why do you people insist on treating Apple like some kind of charity? Lets see - Power Computing CPU, Linux OS, no-name hard drive, generic computer, etc...
This does exactly what for Apple? $25.00 licensing fee maybe? Or restrict cloning and make multi-hundreds in profit per box. Gee, hard choice. Welcome to the wonderful world of capitalism.
And what exactly stopped oh-so-wonderful Power Computing from pulling a VA Research and selling Linux boxes?
Hmm. If I said "(most) people who buy macs^H^H^H^HPCs don't buy them because they want linux (or because the like the g3^H^Hx86 better) but rather because they can't figure out how to use anything else (retards) or they need support for mac^H^H^HWindows software, which under linux isn't supported (from what I understand I don't know if there are any projects like wine^H^H^H^HMac-On-Linux or Sheepshaver). ", would I be lying?
Yes, but only because I know about WINE!
An interesting study with one major flaw. It's well known within the egcs community that egcs produces fairly inefficient assembler for the PowerPC architecture.
So, when the report draws conclusions about the Floating Point performance of the PowerPC vs Pentium vs Alpha, take it with a grain of salt. A good deal of time and effort has been spent optimizing egcs (e.g. pgcc) for Pentium.
This should have been a major factor in their analysis, but they completely missed it.
Nonetheless, PowerPC is behind the curve in Floating Point performance -- just not necessarily because of shortcomings in the microprocessor.
i also understand that there are people building a slackware-style distro for ppc
oh yes! i cut my teeth on slackware on my top-o-line 386, and feel quite uncomfortable in a redhat derived ppc verion of linux. SlackwarePPC...come to papa!
I'm not x86-centric, but current PPC implementations have their problems. The PowerMacs are well-implemented high-quality systems, and the PPC processors themselves, taken alone, give more performance per $$$ than their x86 counterparts. PowerMac system prices, however, are generally disproportionally higher than x86 system prices, and x86 systems give more performance per $$$ than PowerMac systems. Presumably the higher reliability and greater ease-of-use from having a better-designed and more tightly-integrated system justifies this higher cost to a certain class of users, but this is generally not the case with Beowulf users. The reason Beowulf-on-PPC makes sense is because there are many institutions which purchase PowerMacs for non-Beowulf use, and there are long periods of time when these Macs are sitting userless and idle. Someone who needs a powerful cluster system can take advantage of this situation. In other words, while it doesn't make economic sense to buy a PowerMac Beowulf cluster for
the sole purpose of cluster computing, it makes lots of economic sense to make part-time use of underutilized existing resources, clustering systems which have already been purchased for other purposes.
One of the arguments for PowerPC-based desktop systems is that you can get a PPC which is more powerful than the most powerful x86 currently on the market. While this is true, I'm not sure if it's a valid argument, since Alpha-based systems are available which are more powerful than either x86 or PPC systems and are considerably less expensive than the high-end PPC systems. If you need a user-friendly operating environment, then the PowerMac makes more sense, but if the customer just wants a Unix/Linux environment, then the Alpha would be a better choice.
-
-- Guges --
-
Because their entire buisiness model revolved around gutting Apple and jumping to the PC clone biz when they plowed the Mac market under.
The cloners had a chance to expand the marketshare of the Mac and make a killing buy agressively courting the peecee market. Instead they decided to take advantage of a weak Apple by going straight for Apple's sales demographic: no advertisements in mainstream media (except for an odd Motorola advertisement or to in Infoworld. Umax actually advertised it's Wintel gear in Byte,Infoworld, etc.)
The cloners got what was coming to them, and Appl hasgone on to record sales and skyrocketing profits. The gear is pretty kewl, too. Wish they'd hurry up with the Guardpages...OS X is too UNIX-y for my taste...
350MHz G3/1MB L2 cache
64MB SDRAM
6GB Ultra ATA drive
CD-ROM drive
RAGE 128 graphics card
16MB graphics memory
10/100BASE-T Ethernet
$1,599.00 list price
99$ more than a beige Alpha box you talk about. I dare to compare this 350 Mhz PPC to that 533 Mhz Alpha (21064, 21164?).
From store.apple.com:
Power Macintosh G3
350MHz G3/1MB L2 cache
64MB SDRAM
6GB Ultra ATA drive
CD-ROM drive
RAGE 128 graphics card
16MB graphics memory
10/100BASE-T Ethernet
$1,599.00 list price
99$ more than a beige Alpha box you talk about. 533 Mhz Alpha (21064, 21164?).
Yup people, the old Apple died a while ago.
from store.apple.com
350MHz G3/1MB L2 cache
64MB SDRAM
6GB Ultra ATA drive
CD-ROM drive
RAGE 128 graphics card
16MB graphics memory
10/100BASE-T Ethernet
$1,599.00
Now compare this to some beige AXP clone assembled around the corner. And then compare it to a Compaq AXP, after all, we're talking about brand A computers.
from store.apple.com
Power Macintosh G3
350MHz G3/1MB L2 cache
64MB SDRAM
6GB Ultra ATA drive
CD-ROM drive
RAGE 128 graphics card
16MB graphics memory
10/100BASE-T Ethernet
$1,599.00 (list price)
Now compare this to a beige 'bits an' pieces' clone, after that to a Compaq AXP, after all we're talking about name brands here.
Replace the "=" in Copy with BlockMoveDataUncached(). No, it's not ANSI C (it's roots might be in Object Pascal), but so what? If you want to move data quickly (say, writing a custom blitter), you will get dramatically improved performance.
The question is going to be, are they NUBUS or PCI based. NUBUS-based PowerPCs cannot run Linux/PPC or any of its derivatives (turbolinux, yellow dog linux). If your systems are NUBUS based, check out www.mklinux.apple.com. While it is true that Apple has stopped developing MkLinux, there are still people out there who put together code fixes and what not.
As to getting Beowulf to work on any hardware you already own, don't go thru Black Lab Linux, they're selling their own systems, hardware and software. See www.beowulf.org/software/ and, if you've got the guts and time, run compile it and run it yourself. After all, Beowulf is open source, and isn't really based on any hardware specs. The one issue you'll run into is Ethernet thru-put. Clusters with slow ethernet (either because the cards are slow, or the drivers aren't well written) tend to perform poorly. The Beowulf people have written many custom ethernet drivers to fix this, for PC and Alpha based linux. Finding comparable drivers might be tough on Apple/PPC based systems. However, even if you have slow ethernet, you can still run a cluster.
I must say, the list of people who use Linux on Macs has to be one of the most oddly conceived cross-sections of computer users there is.
What makes you say that? Your own biases of who uses a Mac? "conceived"? Sorry, it's a reality.
From my own experience at two different universities, Mac users have a higher general computer "proficiency" level over Win users. I'm not sure why that is. Maybe they are more focused on getting their work done.
In fact, they are, imo, second only to those computer users who use some form of Unix/Linux as their main or exclusive platform. I don't think that is hard to believe; 2 years ago, some numbers were put forth that there was a greater percentage of mac users on the internet than Win folks.
As well, a large number of Linux users use it because it's "trendy" or because they want to be "hackers." The rest of the Linux users fit into the incredibily smart and proficient category of choosing the tool for what they want to do. The flexibility of Linux plays a large role in making it their tool of choice.
Finding that mix is not that hard. I started on a Mac (040, 20 mhz, C610, no fpu). Loved the interface. Tried windows, hated it. Went to unix, which was such a different format (CLI initially) that I had to learn it separately and without biases toward a different windowing interface (as would be until Win3.1 at the time). Fell in love with the CLI, and wondered how I could get both. Now, I get that via PPC linux and MacOS X server.
So if you just hold your regular biases toward Mac users, with them being the "pretty little imac" or the "GUI only" or the "my Mom uses a mac, therefore it sucks" folks, you'd be excluding some pretty damn proficient computer users.
IMO, the biggest problem they have run into is glibc2.1. This has caused more headaches than anything else as it breaks many things. Give these guys a break please.
> support the 68020 (a touch better than i286 class performance)
Come on now, the 68020 is a true 32bit processor, somewhat not even all 386 where, don't compare it to a 286, even the original 68000 is a better processor than the 286.
Friendly,
Sven LUTHER
YellowDogLinux champion 1.0 relly needs a working compiler the one you got now (egcs1.1.2-pre2 !!!) breaks most things I want to compile, even your included kernel source...
Hmm. They might be terrible running just the MacOS, but play Q3T or throw Linux on there, and you will fear their performance.
Doing mathematical equations (generating SSH keys) my G3 is twice as fast as my PII, both at 400 MHz (granted, the G3 has more cache).
Oh, I agree completely -- it's a great architecture. But I'm a businessperson, not a research scientist, and Apple boxes don't give me enough real-world advantages to compensate for their disadvatages. I'm open to persuasion, but your arguments have to show me how I'll (a) save time, (b) save money, and/or (c) get a better product from an end-user standpoint.
Not everyone's a business person. Not everyone works from the premise of "getting" a new computer to run stuff on (see 68k NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Linux projects if you don't believe me). Computers are tools. Not everyone has the same criteria; it varies on their needs. This is obvious.
If you went with cost, you might have gone with an AMD or Celeron, not even a PII or PIII. But there are people who buy PIIs and PIIIs; they aren't stupid just because AMDs and Celerons are cheaper. They might have different criteria, e.g. they needed the little extra speed. There are some people that might want to build Linux servers cheaply.
But there are Linux ports beyond the x86. Why? People had the hardware. If I have an Alpha, need a web server, I might try running Linux on it. It would be stupid to purchase a new machine unless the Alpha was insufficient.
There are Mac users who desire or have reason using MacOS but also have use for running Linux. With PPC Linux, they can use both for the price of one box, not two. What, run MacOS? Plenty of people like it. Plenty of environments exist where it's simply easier to get a MacOS computer over intel.
Thus, likewise, there are people that already have two or three G3s and 604s. Why should they have to go out and buy equipment? Utilize what they have. To research scientists, who you admitted you are not, who might need a clustering option, Black Labs allows them to not spend $10,000-$20,000 on getting intel equipment. $10,000 not spent means more money for regeants or that back-burner experiment that they might not have had funds for. And since a lot of research money is NIH aka taxpayer's money, I am in general a more happy camper that funds are being used efficiently.
i quote from the beowulf mailing list faq v2 at: http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/~utha yopa/bwfaq2.html
2. Where can I get the Beowulf software? [1999-05-13]
There isn't a software package called "Beowulf". There are, however, several pieces of software many people have found useful for building Beowulfs. None of them are essential. They include MPICH, LAM, PVM, the Linux kernel, the channel-bonding patch to the Linux kernel (which lets you 'bond' multiple Ethernet interfaces into a faster 'virtual' Ethernet interface) and the global pid space patch for the Linux kernel (which, as I understand it, lets you see all the processes on your Beowulf with ps, and maybe kill etc. them), DIPC (which lets you use sysv shared memory and semaphores and message queues transparently across a cluster).
As for the licensing info, presumably the patches to the Kernel will be GPL'ed. Check out: http://www.beowulf.org/software/softw are.html. I couldn't find any specific information on liscensing, although they do refer to the software necessary to implement Beowulf as:
implemented as an add-on to commercially available, royalty-free base Linux distributions
hope this helps
alex
Well, I've installed and experimented with MkLinux, PHTs TurboLinux, and LinuxPPC (still waiting on R5). I've also installed and used BeOS. Eventually, I've always gone back to MacOS just because the apps I really need (or want) are there.
Why do Mac people also use Linux?
1) As stated before, if you held out against the Wintel duopoly during the recent dark years, you're not a "just go along" type of person. (Yeah, the whole "Think Different" thing is pretentious, but there's a grain of truth to it. It's a stubborn streak that suits both Mac and Linux users well).
2) It's easy. MacOS coexists peacefully with another OS on the same hard drive. Most of the alternate O/Ss provide easy-to-use dual booters, and choosing between different startup drives has always been trivial on the Mac. You can boot from just about anything on a Mac: external HD, floppy, Zip, Jaz, whatever. So it's easy to experiment with little obligation.
3) This one is subtle, but I think the most important. Both Macs and Linux reinforce the idea that computers are *logically designed and predictable systems that can be mastered*. With Linux there is predictability and mastery, but it requires much greater initial knowledge (i.e., a steep learning curve). You've got to want to do something, then learn how to do it.
With the Mac there is a shallow learning curve, but you can keep going as far as you like. If you're Grandma and you just want to e-mail and file recipes, you can stop there. But I've found the Mac actually encourages "serendipitous" learning -- sometimes I've ended up doing new things just because it was so damn easy and predictable on the Mac. I got a cable modem, then before I knew it I was using my machine as a Web server and router, with three or four other Macs on a LAN with it. And it was *easy*. I've seen novices (like I was) go from using software to installing it, from attaching peripherals to swapping components, from using higher end apps to coding. Even when Macs crash, it can be *logically* narrowed down to an extensions conflict or offending app.
Compare this to the Wintel side of the world, where even experienced technicians just reinstall Windows to solve a problem. Whenever I use Windows I feel like the system is fighting me every step of the way. Sometimes things just don't work. Sometimes it just crashes. No one is ever able to explain it. It's all just freakin' voodoo. Although its not as bad as it used to be, how would anyone ever learn cool stuff by chance when the computer is this inscrutable device that doesn't do simple stuff right? If the computer is not logical and predictable, why even expend effort trying to understand it?
Even if you do make the effort, it's just one kludge after another. Right down to the processor and its assembly language. No offense to the Intel users out there, but x86 assembly language is just a mess. Let's not even discuss PowerPC, because I don't want to make this a Mac-vs-PC thing. Look at MIPS assembly language. Instructions logically grouped, all the same length, with consistent syntax. It's understandable. It's *knowable*. When you look at it you see logic behind the design.
But I'm getting a bit off topic here. Basically, I think the shallow learning curve of the Mac and its consistent design encourages users to learn more. It tells them that computers (and technology in general) are rationally designed things you can understand and master. Do that for long enough and you will build up the necessary knowledge and confidence to tackle Linux.
In any case, yes, it should be freely distributable, but Cheapbytes doesn't sell them because of the United States' inane export laws. Beowulf is considered a munition because it can make computers more powerful than a certain plateau, which in theory can be used to develop weapons, etc.
In any case, if someone has a Beowulf cd, you can legally copy it (I assume that it was exported legally if you're not in the States)
not too many people suggest "Kill Explorer" in windows to boost your processing speed.
thats becausse half the time explorere will die for you, you dont have to do anything!
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Where can I download BlackDog linux? Is there an ISO I can download, or just directories? Linux distrobutions are required to be available for download free right? Thanks
Jeff Knox
Actually, the iMac is selling out like crazy in Japan from what I understand. 50% of all buyers are first-time buyers too.
Japan is a burgeoning personal computer market, and I think it's an intersting trend to see Apple capture so much share so quickly.
-Stu
This is not true... the 604e has 2 fpu units and 2 integer units...
That's not what Motorola's PowerPC 604e product summary says. It lists 3 integer units (2 single-cycle and 1 multi-cycle) and 1 floating point unit. If there's documentation to the contrary, I'd like to see it.
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
Where can I find docs on BlockMoveDataUncached()? Is it a NeXT/Apple proprietary call? It's certainly not ANSI C or POSIX...
I've never had to tweak stream_d like this on anything that had a decent compiler. The code is so simple that it shouldn't be that hard to optimize. On x86, gcc 2.7.2.3, egcs/gcc 2.90.29, and pgcc 3.0.4 all give stream_d results within less than 1% of each other. On our Origin 2000, there's about a 10-15% penalty for using gcc 2.8.1 in place of the SGI C compiler 7.2.1. I've assembled a summary of stream_d results for various systems at http://www.osc.edu/~troy/stream_d.html (and yes, the Cray numbers there are real).
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
a) Your Mac Technician needs to learn to configure the MacOS properly. We have no such speed problems.
b) Apple has adopted the open source theory, at least more than most. They started with MKLinux (Linux on the Mach microkernel), and went on to release Darwin (OSXs foundation, also Mach based) as open source.(yeah, I know it's Apple's open source license, but Rome wasn't built in a day, and they've already revised it in response to feedback) This is already starting to seed other projects (http://www.darwinlinux.com).
--always remember to pillage BEFORE you burn...
Did you deliberatley ignore the word performance?
I understand your point of view, but the macs at our school are secure as all heck. They have every single thing password protected and logged and monitored. The admin maintains them well, making sure nothing is wrong, and I can see that also. I have noticed this with every macintosh I come across, they don't perform to their maximum.
I didn't say linux would completly fix everything. :) What I did mean was that linux would make the macs run faster, provided that this new port and other linux mac ports are good, fast, and up to date. If they are, I will bet that it would run much faster than they currently do with MacOS. As stated above, they are very secure and the admins make sure no one does anything, and I can verify this. So this would be the case in most issues, but not here. G3s and iMacs run less than their full potential.
Yes, playing games on them might be faster, but not your every day applications. These macs are 350 Mhz at the very most, and feel like 300 or less. This is noted by several other students and faculty. Even the die hard mac fans at school have to disagree with the macs' performance and don't like it. But I'm sure games would run perfectly on it though, as it is loaded with good graphics cards and video applications.
We have around 300 G3s and 4 iMacs at our school(the government gave the school discounts). We've had macs since the opening of the school years ago. Anyway, the performance of G3s and iMacs is terrible. Now, I may not be a big mac fan to begin with, but the performance of those computers is lacking. I think linux would run well on them, but it's amazing how slow stuff will run, when they claim there's a 300+ Mhz processor in the boxes. It's good to see that different versions of linux are being ported for macs, maybe apple will open it's eyes and adopt the open source theory. Wait, no they wont. :)
droool...
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
Most Mac users I know know little about computing, and don't particularly care to know more. I dare say that most Mac users that most people know are this way. Quite a lot of people get Macs because they think that PC's are "too hard to use". They want the out of the box experience.
I believe that technically competent Mac people are more visible than technically competent Windows people just because Mac advocates tend to be loud. Very loud.
I know some solid coders who love Mac, but not many. The competent Mac people get really touchy about how non-technical the Mac user base is, but that doesn't change matters.
Apple tries very hard to look cute and sell to hipsters. Some proficient computer users use their products, but not all that many.
--Lenny
The iMac runs the G3, which is the decendent of the 603. If I remember correctly, the 603 chip was designed as a "consumer level" chip, and therefore isn't designed to do anything much beyond single-processor stuff.
:-)
I didn't bother reading the report (Postscript..no printer happy...too lazy to use a reader), but I would suspect that the 604 would yield much better results. The 604 was made to be a more versitile "industrial" strength processor and therefore includes many features that are absent on the 603. The G4, which is supposed to ship before too long, is a decendent of the 604, and likewise may yield better results than the G3.
Then again, I could be on crack and be completely wrong....since I didn't read the report. So if I am wrong, please correct me kindly
I totally respect what you just said cause I was actually wondering why you would want to do that. But as for that door stop I wouldn't want to put anything on it especially not windows : )
he's right. and mac linux is not as good as linux for an x86 or a computer with alpha archs. IMHO I don't think it is even worth making linux for a mac, (most) people who buy macs don't buy them because they want linux (or because the like the g3 better) but rather because they can't figure out how to use anything else (retards) or they need support for mac software, which under linux isn't supported (from what I understand I don't know if there are any projects like wine). He is a buisness man and he isn't looking to fuck around he is going to want to get down to business; like most everone else.
> > The Yellow Dog site also cites lower power consumption with 20 G3s than 20 Pentiums, due to the far more power-efficient PowerPC. How useful is this in reality? I don't know.
Not very. Performance matters, and that paper about clustering PPCs says it's not very high on PPC, unfortunately.
-- haaz.
An Australian research team clustered a bunch of iMacs, and the results were sad. Intel and Alpha boxes trounced the iMacs. The iMacs weren't designed for that sort of application, either, but it points out some major problems with using PPC (currently) for that sort of application -- at least on the iMac.
The article is at:
http://www.dhpc.adelaide.e du.au/reports/065/abs-065.html.
-- haaz.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Old, but interesting. Check it out.
> Ubiquity. Not as many macs in the world as PCs,
:-). Surveys showes the Mac below 1%, Linux at 4% in western-europa.
> but the lopsided numbers / market share I think
> are misleading, since it's hard to go ten
> minutes in any US city and avoid seeing either
> an ad or an actual iMac / G3, not to mention
> older and still humming Macs.
And thats the point: Outside the US Macs are completly unknown. Asking for a mac in munich is like asking for Prinz Andrew in a Bottle. And if you finally get one, it costs at least 30% more than in the US+import-toll. An imac for $2000?
Guess what...
thats quite sad because PCs are even cheaper than in the us (anyone needs a $500-PC?
And the further you went to the east (poland, ukrainia, russia) the more you see linux around. I was amazed to see a bunch of old 386/486-systems running at a remote friends home somewhere near St.Petersburg - all linux. In those regions you can find up to 25% of all systems running linux.
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
I like the yellowdog people a lot, but yellowdog 1.0 was released so far before it was ready, and their support (on-line at least) is horrible. AFAICT, it's one brave guy (many, many kudos to you, Dan!) who has way too many hats to wear. Yellowdog 1.1 looks like it'll be a really good product, but if blacklab is anything like that, well... wait. Wait quite some time. I'm sure you'll see good product from them eventually.
~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
Besides, OSX * is not quite ready for prime time... More QA needs to be done...
yeah, but can you fix the source of those bugs in OSX server?
I mean, if you're not an Apple employee, that is...
(I particularly love Apple's workaround regarding the CGI problems with Apache: don't run CGIs. GREEEAAAAAT... Nobody uses _that_ old technology anyways...)
BTW: OSX Server is currently for sale for $499, and is _not_ a beta version..
(a) save time, (b) save money, and/or
(c) get a better product from an end-user standpoint.
One way IMHO is hardware maintainability. Power Macs (and most 68K Macs) are smart enough to select a bootable hard drive, boot directly from CD when requested, use default boot settings (just in case your newly-compiled Linux kernel isn't up to the task), etc. Compared to Intel machines, Macs are a breeze to maintain. So much so, in fact, that if it weren't for the lag in porting the latest versions of Linux S/W (apps as well as drivers, mind you), I'd say there's no reason to buy an Intel box.
Side note to haaz: Whither LinuxPPC 5.0?
I've doctored Intel machines running under WinXX, Win3.1, OS/2, WinNT, and dealing with the hardware was always a pain. Maybe that's changed somewhat, but the Mac was always easier to futz with.
-----
".sig,
Ok. So there's a Black Lab as the mascot.
SOOOOOO, isn't anyone besides be disturbed by the friendly words, "Enter the Lab" on their web site?
-- We live in a world where lemonade is artificial and soap has real lemon.
You don't once mention MacOS X or NetBSD/macppc. MacOS X runs exceedingly well on G3 PowerMacs, from the original beige boxes forward to the rev D iMacs and G3 "pretty" towers. NetBSD is a proven operating system that has been ported to more archtectures than any other OS in existance and runs quite well, even on an iMac.
Linux, IMO, is not quite ready for prime time when a nasty TCP/IP stack bug is allowed to kill a running 2.2.x kernel remotely by anyone. Obviously more QA needs to be done *rolls eyes* Every OS has bugs, every OS has little conditions that cause it to burp or hiccup. They get fixed. It's no big deal.
I'll apologize out front, but I really take offense with some of your comments. To say that it is not worth making linux for a mac is entirely out of line. Your other comments displays a level of ignorance or bias that is absolutely pathetic. I'm almost speechless.
For one thing, there are some extremely talented ppl porting linux to the PPC. Consider this point. These ppl, who are a small minority of linux developers, have somehow managed to get linux working on the PPC architecture. Are their efforts are a waste of time? Why did they choose to develop for the PPC?
Perhaps you only want an Intel version of linux? Or maybe only an Intel, Sparc, or Alpha port of linux? The great thing about linux is that it is cross-platform! You are obviously too young to remember when Unix was a totally splintered OS. Linux represents a way to reunify Unix, which is a really important point. This requires cross-platform support otherwise you get HP-UX, Apollo-Unix, AIX, AUX, SCO, Ultrix, SunOS, ad nauseum.
As for a MacOS "emulator": Have you heard of SheepShaver or Mac-On-Linux? Not entirely there yet, but they are real close!
I have been a Mac user for over 10 yrs so I must be a retard. My first experience with Unix was with an IBM RT (try to figure out what was this POS). This at times was a tough machine to work with, but it did have a C compiler and introduced me to a better computing environment. I still like this computing environment and still use a Mac.
How can you say that a G3 with a Seagate Cheetah (ultra2 wide of course) is not fast enough for a disk system.
I didn't.
How can you say that a G3 with an 100Mbit card is any slower than what you can get with Linux for the x86?
I didn't.
What you forget is that we are not comparing the MacOS to windows here. We are comparing Linux on x86 to Linux on PPC. There is a big difference between these two comparisons.
Duh.
If you really say that bandwidth and harddrive speed are at the crux of the situation, then you are truly mistaken to claim that one should never use PPC hardware.
Never said that, don't believe that.
There simply is no difference!!! [between PPC Linux and 386 Linux]
Except for price, availability, diversity of vendors and configurations, and support. Those factors outweighed the superiority of the PPC architecture for me. I hope that won't always be the case.
-- Tom Geller
Tom Geller
"The platform has grown up, partly because Apple has close control over what goes on."
Oh, I agree completely -- it's a great architecture. But I'm a businessperson, not a research scientist, and Apple boxes don't give me enough real-world advantages to compensate for their disadvatages. I'm open to persuasion, but your arguments have to show me how I'll (a) save time, (b) save money, and/or (c) get a better product from an end-user standpoint.
--Tom
Tom Geller
I won't bore you with the details, 'cause I'm sure you know them. Price, component availability, a community of support, yadda yadda yadda. Although I really wanted to use a PPC-based machine, I had to ask myself: What advantages would I gain?
Speed? Processor speed is virtually irrelevant in Internet serving, as bandwidth and disk access are the gating factors. Striking a blow against an evil company? Apple's not so clean, and certainly can't claim better corporate morality than AMD or the screwdriver shop where I bought my Linux box. (Needless to say, there will be no Microsoft code on it. :) )
Having said that, I'm glad to see Yellow Dog continuing with its plans. Until now, there have been three PPC Linux vendors that I know of: TurboLinux, mkLinux, and LinuxPPC Inc. (not the same as LinuxPPC.org). Frankly, none of them have approached the market with the resources, experience or commitment needed to make an impact. mkLinux is the side project of a book publisher; TurboLinux does PPC support as an afterthought (and devotes $0 to PPC Linux promotion AFAIK); and LinuxPPC Inc. has problems best not discussed in public. Yellow Dog seems to be making the first real stab at the market: I hope they can eventually convince people like me that running Linux on PPC is the best deal.
-- Tom Geller
Tom Geller
Certain Macs, like my Performa 5200 and most NuBus-based boxes will probably never run Linux or anything other than the Mac OS. Now that MkLinux has officially been dropped by Apple, none of the other Linux distros have any real interest in developing for older machines, when there is plenty of demand to get these pretty new G3s going. If you really want to run *NIX on a cheap old Mac, buy an old 68k off eBay and squeeze NetBSD into it.
I prayed about it, and God said, "Don't do it!" But I thought, "I know better."
You say that you would love to run a PPC Linux distro on your powerbook, so why don't you? At this moment, I am writing this on a G3/266 Powerbook in LinuxPPC 4.1. The distibution is a bit weak with some stuff broken, but as a whole, it is great. You really come to love SRPMs after a while when doing this. I use my powerbook to write and run scientific simulation code and it fares quite well against a K6-2 300. I would seriously recomend that you try it. When release 5 of LinuxPPC comes out, it should be quite nice (looking at the pre5 stuff on line) I will leave speed judgements to a minimum because I'm biased (I work on a 1024 Processor Cray T3E)
Joshua Pearson
History has the relation to truth that theology has to religion-i.e. none to speak of. - Lazarus Long
Ah. "DO NOT TRUST THIS PERSON" in the subject of an Anonymous Poster. The everyday ironies.
LinuxPPC R5 is one of my main OSs (the other is MacOS X Server) on my G3. I use it every day and it schools my Intel box at work in terms of speed (PII, same clock speed).
LinuxPPC, Inc. are a bit shady of a company but I don't understand why the PPC is given such a hard time when it comes to Linux... No one says, Linux on Alpha? Stupid idea! - or - Linux on Sparc? Why waste our time!!
Is it because Apple is associated w/ the PowerPC that it is "uncool"?
RateVegas.com - Vegas Reviews
The best way to keep a system running clean but allow the user full access to the system is to run a system like revdist or assimilator. They both have a HD image on a server that is restored to each workstation after a preset time period or number of restarts. Pretty cool. The HD restoration periods arent exactly lightning quick, but they still keep things running clean and fast when you are actually USING the system.
cheers,
The paper stresses over and over again that they think the iMacs could have done much better if the LinuxPPC software were a bit more mature. They used LinuxPPC v4.0; I'd be curious to see how they do using a v2.2 Linux kernel. Or, as they mention, OS X.
:-)
The graphs make it painfully clear that even 100Mbps Ethernet is too inefficient for serious parallel computation. A token-passing system like ATM is much better.
My third comment is a "me too": It would be interesting indeed to see the test repeated with 350MHz 604E processors, which should wipe the floor with those iMacs in FP - and maybe even the Pentiums! Somebody send me a crate full of PM 9600/350s, and I'll do the tests.
Why would anyone want to use Mac hardware for Linux?
1. Controlled configuration! Unlike the PC, there aren't that many oddball hardware configurations on the Mac. With my PC, I had to scrounge all over for Linux drivers for all the different things on it. With the Mac, my model either is supported or isn't.
2. Better CPU architecture. My 75MHz Mac is at least as fast as my P90.
3. Higher least common denominator. My Mac can do everything the PC can, and it has **ZERO** cards in it. Right out of the box, the Mac has SCSI, 16-bit sound, 24-bit video, 10baseT, high-speed (288-1000+ kbps) serial ports, USB-like hot-pluggable input bus (ADB)... and its PCI slots are still empty! All of these are (see point #1) standard. Support this one family of devices, and you've got a pretty deluxe Linux build that supports a broad cross section of Apple's product line.
When will it go into the main distribution anyway? I gather its gpl nowdays so it shouldnt be a license issue. After all, its a feature that no mainstream OS is providing currently. I belive QNX and hence AOS5 will though.
Is this discussion *really* about Linux on Macs? As per usual with a Mac-related story, there are several posts which seem to stray from the main topic.
...
Still looking for some kind of filter so I can read the interesting (well, at least relevant) posts rather than the 'Macs-suck' posts
YS
"Arrr! The laws of science be a harsh mistress." -- Bender
Back when it looked very bleak for Apple, the backup plan was to learn Linux. The feeling was, that it was better to go Linux than to surrender to Windoze. Many of the Mac users who are also Linux users are a resource, and a decided plus for the platform.
For myself, I will fight for Linux as hard as I fought for the Mac. Intel, AMD, or PPC, means nothing. It is Linux that matters. If I had to decide between Microsoft or nothing, I'd choose nothing.
photosMy Photostream
Can anybody clarify the licensing/price for Beowulf? Is it GPL? Can I legally copy somebody else's Beowulf CD?
I'm just a touch confused. Red Hat's site seems to imply it's all under GPL, but I've yet to see any Cheapbytes-esque $1.95 CD...
Funny, it had always struck me as the obvious choice. A fairly high percentage of Mac users have chosen that platform because they believe it to be technically superior, as opposed to simply because it's what everyone else uses. Without even addressing the issue of whether the platform actually is superior, what's significant is the larger number of people willing to be nonconformist, and right, rather than compatible, and wrong.
Linux users seem to share this attribute, often having spent years fighting against Windows-compatibility issues, because they felt that having an internally superior system was worthwile.
While non-tech artists, or luddite grandmothers are one stereotype of the mac userbase, they aren't the whole thing. It's important to remember that a very high number of mac users are quite technically competent, and have chosen the platform because of this, not in spite of it.
I'd have to agree here, guys. So many GNU/Linux types seem to be of the perception that the desktop world goes little or no farther than x86. Now, it's not _that_ bad and, thanks to IBM's licensing of the technology, it's a commodity by now. But in some big ways, it's behind the times and it's going to stay that way until someone decides to break with compatibility - which, let's be honest, isn't going to happen.
I stuck with Amigas for years because I seriously disliked the Wintel platform from a technology POV. TBH, I still do and would move off it like a shot if I found another which had enough software to make life comfortable. I used Macs for years and loced them, in many ways. Sure, MacOS is behind the times and sure, they're only beginning to catch up on some architectural fronts, but this was in a school networking environment, with kids doing all sorts of silly things. Breaking them was near impossible, fixing them relatively simple. As I was leaving, WinNT PCs started appearing, and problems appeared - not just with the OS, either.
Fact is, x86 is only popular on the back of DOS, Windows and cloning. If another platform had had them for any length of time, I'd have to say that x86 simply wouldn't be here in any serious numbers. GNU/Linux always seems a trifle x86 centred to me - which makes sense, when you consider that it was written because Mr. Torvalds wanted an OS to fiddle with on the i386 he already had. Now, I know that GNU/Linux wouldn't have become as popular as it has without being x86 at the start, but it's worth remembering that there are often better platforms elsewhere. Most successful usually doesn't esual best.
Greg
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Tom wrote:
(a) save time,
(b) save money,
(c) get a better product from an end-user standpoint.
I assume you mean saving time over a x86 version of linux...
A: Saving time...Essentially all mac hardware is supported afaik since it has to be all compatible just to run the MacOS
B: Saving money...If you do happen to prefer x86 for the many reasons you perhaps -SHOULD-, this at least gives you something to use your mac for. The ability to take an 'old' G3 and get a passable web server is a useful thing, regardless of its performance compared to another platform.
C: Better Product...I'm not sure i can answer this because i'm not sure what your product is -- i'll try. If it's hardware then in my experience Linux gives you better control which equals better testing if you're going for Mac compatibility. If you market software for linux then knowing how it will perform on various architectures is quite useful to a customer. If you make coffee holders, well i'm not sure a PPC linux will do you any good over another architecture's.
Apparently you've missed the relatively exciting things apple has done the the Mac architecture lately. The platform has grown up, partly because Apple has close control over what goes on.
Besides, what's the point of developing a unix for 286's etc. (minix)...for one because it can be done, but also because the more platforms an OS supports the more useful it can be -- even for that doorstop 8086 lying around (let's see you boot M$ Windows 98 on that.
I'll quickly admit,though, that i'm not a Mac advocate; i don't use one.
>I think that Linux and the Mac make a great combination
>I don't understand why Apple pulled the plug on clones -- how about because they were making Apple look slow by releasing faster, cheaper machines?
I think you answered your own ? - linuxppc + clonemakers == no revenues for apple!
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
Hi guys,
Maybe someone can explain this for me. I'm not sure if it is because of the differences between RISC vs. CISC processors, or if the PowerPC is better at floating point operations, or just what.
I'm running the SETI@home screensaver on two machines. The first is a Macintosh PowerBook (several years old) 3400c, using the PowerPC 603e at 180MHz and running Mac OS 8.6. The second is a new desktop AMD K6-2 350MHz machine running Win98.
After completing a few data units, I noticed that the PowerBook is completing data units about TWICE as fast as the AMD. I can't figure out why this is!
--globalnap.net, product of pure caffeine--
(Background: I've been through a number of Macintoshes and I'm on my fourth PC right now)
... the fact that they use not just a diff. manu but a different architecture is good for everyone. Here's a whopper of an analogy: what if paper was somehow constructed so it could only be written on with one sort of pen? That would seem silly, since there are lots of other choices. But software tend to be written to OSes themselves entirely dependent on their host hardware. Linux helps buck this trend (not as much as the BSDs, maybe, but still) by providing an OS which runs on multiple platforms.
...
Like the other respondents to this point of view, I don't have an irate reply, but would agree with those other respondents as well that the total universe of Mac users is pretty broad.
Why would anyone want to run Linux / other Free OS on a Mac? That's not exactly the question here, but it seems to be lurking beneath the surface, and that same question was asked in a thread one level up from here.
I can't answer this for everyone, but here are the reasons I think that Linux and the Mac make a great combination, practically and normatively.
- Macs tend to have nice human engineering. The gulf is not as wide as it was 10 years or 5 years or maybe 2 years ago compared to the PC world, but well-labled parts, legible icons, attempts at friendlization still IMHO work better on Macs, but this comparison of course ignores that PC vendors vary tremendously in this respect.
- Macs use non-Intel chips
- They look cool. That factor sells a lot of PCs, however unsatisfying that fact may be.
- Ubiquity. Not as many macs in the world as PCs, but the lopsided numbers / market share I think are misleading, since it's hard to go ten minutes in any US city and avoid seeing either an ad or an actual iMac / G3, not to mention older and still humming Macs.
- The Mac OS begs for a replacement, or at least whines a little. I use one at work (an iMac) and am actually fairly happy with it (Most of my complaints I list on my web page and will skip here) but it crashes all the time! I would love to be running an underlying *nix, whether it still looked like the basically-well-conceived Mac OS or like my home linux machine.
I don't understand why Apple pulled the plug on clones -- how about because they were making Apple look slow by releasing faster, cheaper machines? -- but I wish they hadn't. Then we could perhaps be running on a G3 PowerComputing box with SCSI, firewire and USB by now
anyhow. I don't have a home mac, but if I find a cheap one I'd like to run some free OS on it.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
will this work with the old powerpc 601's that i have ?? they're not G3's or imacs but the old PowerPC with the 12 inch apple pc compatible cards...pentium 100 + powerpc processor i think.
Well, I use Yellow Dog (kind of, still have a lot to learn) and I think that the combonation of *nix and the mac is a potentially powerfull concept. Indeed Mac OS X tries to pull this very trick. You can't tell me for a second that the vast majority of Linux users wouldn't slobber over an OS with the underpinnings of *nix and the ease of use of the Mac OS. In the meantime, while we're waiting for this messiah of operating systems, we have to choose between ease of use (mac os) or power (linux). Windows would fit somewhere in the middle, not as easy to use as the mac os, but argueably more powerfull (NT anyway) and linux is more powerfull but tougher to use. As a person who believes in the best tool for the job, I find that the mac os best meets my needs when trying to record my band (thanks Deck II) and I use linux for most of my network activity. It's not about uptime, it's about productivity. I feel like I have the best of both worlds. And let's not forget that, for what it is, the G3 kicks serious ass. I can't wait to see what G4 Alti-vec copper chips w/ SOI manufactured on a .18 micron process can do. Anyone know if there will be Alti-vec support in any of the PPC Linuxen?
--- Don't ever trust a woman until she's dead- B.B. King
I would love to run the PPC linux distributions on my PowerBook G3. As for the incredibly intellectual assertions that G3s are slow and "suck" well then I offer this:
My PowerBook G3/266 eats through SETI@Home work units at an average of 12.8 hrs each. Now I know that isn't exactly a fair benchmark (everyone seems to cry foul when Apple comes ahead) but it goes to show how good crunching is when an app is written almost correctly for the system. LinuxPPC (if there was a SETI client) would completely blow the doors off in speed.
Those who laugh at you for you having a Mac.. are the people who constantly call you to fix their PC.
I'm a Mac user, and I have a B&W G3 at home. I use it for font design, layout, prepress, and music. Okay-- why would I want to run Linux?
A little background. For a long time, I was a DOS-head. Macs were beige toasters--good concept, bad price. DOS 3.3 was a decently stable OS for the day. And it had a command line! Anything that wouldn't let me grab the OS by the balls and force it to do what I wanted was infuriating.
Then Windows came along. I resisted as long as I could, not the least because it was so *cheesy*. It didn't help that I took a detour into the Wild Land of Unix for a couple of years. Unix was bizarre--it had a command line, but it made no pretense of making concessions to the human operating it. It said, "I'm a computer. I'm a box of silicon. Don't pretend I'm your friend. Realize I'm an appliance." I saw the light.
However, apps were hard to come by. DOS faded, Windows emerged as the unfortunate platform of choice. I eventually made my piece with Win 3.11. It was usable, and didn't make grandiose promises about its usability.
I drifted into graphic design, and had a chance to get a Power PC when they first came out. Suddenly, the Mac was less of a toy, more of a powerhouse. Plus, the lack of command line wasn't a problem any more--the OS had been massaged so that I could get along without the infuriating sense of "something bad going on without my knowledge." Yes, some tweaking would have been nice, but there were OS extensions for many things.
Windows 95 came along. I was repulsed by the obvious crib from the Mac, and the new attitude of Microsoft. Win95 was *the* answer to all your problems! I tok a test drive and said, "*This* is the OS for Luddite grandmothers."
About this time, Apple started to lose big-time. I wondered if I was stuck on a dying platform. I started looking around for options.
NT came along. Could this be a quality MS product? I thought maybe, and with $$$$ in my eyes, took a couple of MCSE courses. Hah! What a crock! Three classes in, I quit with disgust. I would have to be happy with my niche-market machine. As a graphic designer, I *was* a niche market.
So, I was happy with MacOS up all the way through 8.1. It wasn't perfect, but it wasn't annoying. Yes, it did crash, but I usually knew *why*, since I was doing something really stupid at the time. Windows become more and more cloying and gooey. Everything I thought about Macs in 1987 was now true of Wintel boxes--toys for cretins.
Then Microsoft bailed out Apple. The new G3's (a bleeding-edge commercially-available desktop box if I've ever seen one) came with MacOS 8.5. And the horror! The aliases had little Windows arrows! There was native Wintel TrueType support! FILE EXTENSIONS WERE STARTING TO BECOME NECESSARY!
In vain I tried to go back to 8.1. It didn't have the architecture support, USB support, FireWire support, or DVD support. I was screwed! Then, some of my most cherished design tools started acting up, for no apparent reason! Suddenly, I WANTED A COMMAND LINE.
Enter Linux. It's stable and free. It doesn't lard the system with crap. It says, "Treat me as an appliance, not as a friend. If you want a friend, talk to my friend X, or KDE, or GNOME." The users of the system like to share ideas and workarounds. I could get back to hacking a box, if I felt the desire.
The only problem I have with Linux right now is the dearth of applications. To truly migrate from Microtosh OS 8.5, I need a layout program with CMYK prepress capabilities, and PostScript font controls. These may already exist--I haven't yet looked because I'm not running Linux yet.
Yellow Dog Linux has my wholehearted support. When more Mac-heads come into the fold, the more chance there will be a port of PageMaker or Quark or Adobe Type Manager or Freehand or Illustrator--or even a GPL version of these fine tools.
Wholeheartedly, WHOPPINGLY ironic that I get moderated for flamebait for a posting a comment that generated 10 sincere, intelligent replies to my query.
/. reader, I couldn't pass up a chance to soapbox about my Mac when x86 gets all the press around here. :)
I find this rather amusing myself, although the original comment didn't strike me as obvious flamebait. Regardless, as a regular
if you are unhappy with the current state of usb support, plug an old mac keyboard and mouse into the ADB port; you should be able to use them fine w/linux.
> Linux is a very un-Green operating system.
NOT.
Someone here took temperature measurements on a dual boot Linux/Window95 PII. Windows 95 was found to run the CPU 18F to 20F hotter than linux.
Standard Windows95 does not seem to HALT the CPU during idle time.
--hopscotch
US energy has a relatively low cost of about $1/watt-year. Non-US energy costs are generally higher. For many energy efficiency is not a significant individual cost. Yet, consider the following...
CASE 1. Embedded High Performance Computing.
Sustainable PERFORMANCE/WATT can be a strong processor selection criteria for *embedded* processor selection including embedded high performance computing. Hence, vendors in the niche embedded high performance market tend to use PowerPC and DSP chips, not Alpha, Pentium or SPARC for dense compute solutions.
Vendor examples: CSPI, Mercury, Sky
Did folks notice that Black Lab Linux (see optional software) is working with MPI Software Technologies? Look close, MPI Software Technologies is actively supporting *embedded* MPI & MPI-RT.
CASE 2. Not Too Large Clusters (50 or so processors)
Also, notice the HPC Wire news article posted on the Top 500 site where...
"Several problems were caused by the power consumption and the heat in that small laboratory. The Paderborn people needed the fire brigade to pump cold air into the room. The power consumption was about 10 - 12 KWatt. Switching on only the power supplies of the nodes, the electric fuses switched off."
CASE 3. Blue Mountain...
6,144 processors -- 10,000 KW always online; 2,600 KW average usage.
SIXTEEN A/C Units plus FOUR 750-ton chillers plus TWO 10MW power stations (major UPS feature)
CASE 4. Aggregate World Energy Consumption (Green perspective)
Now consider 100,000,000 processors on desktops (far less than one per world capita)
100,000,000 * 30 watts-year * US$1/watt-year = US$3 Billion each year (without consideration for cooling costs, higher average world energy prices, CPU fan MTBF costs & such)
Hey, what's US$30 / year per CPU for a typical US home wallet??? Well maybe not much to many reading this... however, the energy costs can add up. Embedded system designers, large scale system installations, and environmentally sensitive people know what I'm talking about.
-- Think Global, Act Local --
--beachcomber
You can count me among those folks. Given that my current four-box basement *nix network only musters about 150 bogomips between them, adding my (most powerful) Mac to the mix would only help!
Carefree highway, let me slip away on you.
I must say, the list of people who use Linux on Macs has to be one of the most oddly conceived cross-sections of computer users there is. Let the irate replies from the minions of Mac-nix users out there commence. I'm genuinely looking forward to hearing your arguments. So far on this topic I've seen a few people defend the use of Linux on Macs, but none of them actually practiced this rare art themselves.
-
I just got done reading that paper. The 233 mhz Imacs did really bad in those tests. Not being able to compile half the benchmarks because of limitations of glibc-1.99 probably didn't help either.
I'm very interested to see the results from a 450 mhz blue & white G3 with glibc-2.1. (at least with glibc-2.1 one should be able to compile everything that builds on a Red Hat 6.0 system)
I find it rather disturbing, it seems everyone here is so x86 centric. Common guys, I use both, and clearly the Pentium is a piece of retriever shit compared to the G3. Not to mention the PIII, a mere joke. A year old shipping chip, the G3, still beats a brand new PIII, even at slower clock speeds (which not always matters of course). Checkout OS X Server or LinuxPPC, on a much faster RISC processor. And as for all this "g3 FPU crap", that is exactly what it is, crap, BS. The FPU on a G3 will punch any Pentium out of the ring easy. If you really want to see FPU performance like none other, read into the G4's by the end of the year. BTW, where are the Merced's? heh
I have a 400 Mhz B&W G3 tower, it sure in hell boots without a monitor attached :)
Developement for MkLinux is has seen a dramatic increase in activity recently. Check out their Web site at http://www.mklinux.org.
Hi, payasos.
You know it's becoming more and more apparent that the folks who are writing in with their gripes about Macs, PC's and whatever else are generally full of it. You've got the same guys writing in every damned time there's a platform related topic (especially when it's a Macintosh topic and never when it's a Linux topic). And the line is always the same.
Example: Mr. Joe says the Cray T90 is good.
Response: You know, I went out and got 2 of those Cray T90's and put it up against my PentiumIII/K-6 and blah blah blah it's soooo slow blah blah Cray sucks.
Well good for you. You certainly convinced me. I will probably throw out all of my existing equipment and buy your exact rack, how's that? Ever heard of slowing the progress of computing? Well guess what, you're engaging in it daily and at an astounding rate. Hell, you've even got me doing it too! So I'll end this and beg. Please shut up. Please don't bitch about these things. Don't like it? Don't use it. Broken? Fine, you fix it, smart ass. Damn.
-Pharaoh