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SGI Visual Workstation to run Linux by Year End
Caballero writes "This
article on
news.com says that SGI will be supporting Linux on their visual workstation products by the end of the year.
" The real key is that while current workstations
can boot
Linux, they aren't really optimized for it. SGI is putting
the effort in to let Linux shine on their hardware. We hope.
That's what I would really like to see. After all, BeOS is the _Media_ OS, made from the ground up with large files, multiprocessing and streaming media in mind. Video editing, rendering, and other visual effects applications using BeOS on an SGI Visual Workstation would be a hard to be combination, don't you think? Are there plans to port BeOS?
I mean, Linux is great and all, but the only thing I think it has on BeOS in terms of suitability for multimedia type stuff is more applications and better hardware support. (And that is the same one thing that Windows has on Linux for any use.)
Vidi, Vici, Veni
SGI can help Linux out a great deal by providing dedicated hardware which supports some Linux nicities. First on my list would be support for full configuration via the serial port, similar to the SPARC systems from Sun.
Of course, it's also gratifying to see another vendor promising support for IA-64. This is enough of a radical departure from IA-32 that compiler support will be very tricky. IA-64 requires the compiler to properly order the instructions in order to gain any performance over IA-32. Without a very thorough optimizer, Linux on IA-64 would likely run slower than on IA-32. Since SGI is banking on high performance, it seems likely they'll contribute to EGCS or GCC.
I'm also looking forward to using XFS on linux. Imagine a logging filesystem with no 2GB file size limits...
They don't talk about it too much, but I believe that SGI is funding PI in their DRI effort. Also, SGI open-sourced GLX (their layer between GL and X) back in February, as part of the effort to help Precision Insight (and everybody else) write good Linux OpenGL interfaces.
So, I suspect that SGI is working with PI closely and will use the DRI.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Jon Leech
SGI Core OpenGL Group
> Imagine Linux running 128 CPUs in the same box with a massive amount of memory.
As Linus noted, support for more than 4 processors would add unnecessary kernel overhead for uniprocessors. I suspect SGI would include this as one of their value added features of Linux + Irix (somebody better think of a better logo for this rather than a rainbow colored penguin).
SGI exec team are not stupid (although their marketing guys seem to be rather flat-footed), if OS innovations are being generated faster by an external group (which Linux appears to be at the moment) then it is better to harness the external momentum and build on top of it and reallocate precious staff resources to where it is really needed. Personally I would see great benefits in tuning the GNU compilers to be more aware of the underlying cache systems and their souped up bus (those cache-lines, false sharing, etc) are a pain to manually exploit and also makes the standard code base rather unportable. SGI also has got some nice memory subsystem hardware which could benefit from going mainstream to really sort out that kfluffle between NGIO and FIO.
Imagine the CPU grunt of an Alpha, the I/O, memory and graphics of an SGI, peripherals of IBM, the pricing of Dell, and the software stability of Linux as your dream box.
Let each vendor concentrate on their strengths and allow the free market to decide on the worth of their products based on a unencumbered and informed choice!
LL
Does anyone know if SGI plans to use Precision Insight's direct rendering pipeline (XFree86 4.0, IOW) on the VW's, when the Linux support is ready? Or will all the work be done through a custom-built X server?
Without the pipeline infrastructure, it wouldn't be possible to render [as fast as possible] to an X window, wouldn't it?
iSKUNK!
The article mentions that Irix and Linux will converge in the future. Is it just me, or is this a really good thing? Irix has a lot it can bring to Linux. Hopefully this starts catching with all the other major Unix vendors and they start looking to it as a common ground for technology.
Imagine Linux running 128 CPUs in the same box with a massive amount of memory.
/me drools
æeee!
I just got one of these babies, and I hope that SGI will get going on the port! Right now there's a website under SGI's domain with info on Linux for their various systems.
http://www.linux.sgi.com/The good news:
It runs (Yea!)
It will display on the flat screen (YES!)
The bad news:
It needs an IDE (no SCSI)
No X acceleration
No OpenGL acceleration
"Very little" PCI card support
I'm loading it when I get my next paycheck and I can pick up an IDE drive! I'll keep you all informed...
-Stryemer
We are the music makers,
and we are the dreamers of the dream.
-Stryemer
We are the music makers,
and we are the dreamers of the dream.
Now I haven't seen anything officially, but when I was at the SGI offices last week I could have sworn I heard something about moving the video support beyond the simple frame buffer. When I asked about it, something about a NDA was mumbled.
I'm also pretty certain I saw it running in SMP mode, but the memory detection didn't appear to be correct.
Holding your LUG meeting at SGI has certain advantages.
The only hope of making the VW really useful is to get Linux fully working. With any luck Linux will actually provide USB support beyond the stinking keyboard/mouse combo.
Of course even then the VW is only marginally useful. One empty 64-bit PCI (how many 64-bit cards are out there?), non-standard memory and bus all add up to make the VWs fun machines to play with, but an expensive nightmare to maintain and make usable.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll