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SGIs Linux Future
james outlaw wrote in to send us a story at news.com that talks about SGIs
Linux Plans. We know about their Intel based Linux servers, but according to this article, they plan to
lead with Linux, and only offer NT as an add-on.
When they start shipping those Visual Workstations with Linux default, I'll definitely start desiring one.
One physical RGB->CMYK swatchbook costs about $100, (it can had for less) and they change from year to year. That's just the swatchbook (not software) to convert to CMYK --usable only if you already know the Pantone RGB values. Which you won't since you're using GIMP. Can you color calibrate a monitor to a Heidelberg press or a Lino-Hell drum scanner in GIMP? No. So you can't take a physical rgb->CMYK swatchbook and match chips to your monitor's colors and get anywhere close to what will come off the service bureau/printer's press. Your boss won't like this. Your client won't like this either. Problem.
Even supposing you had authorization from your manager and just had a burning desire to piss your printer off forever (thereby assuring your jobs always get lowest priority) by insisting on using this software without color management where's your integration with a standard pagelayout program --ie, Quark or Adobe's own InDesign? Nowhere. So there's your lesson for the day, now go tell all your friends what you've learned and don't ask such stupid arrogant, questions again --M'Kay?
Now you know I beg Adobe to port their software to Linux and hope SGI can help this eventually come to be.
I'm not suggesting that SGI will be able to get out of the OS development business. If they want XFS, ccNUMA, and friends in Linux they're going to have to do the port and keep putting work (read "money") in to maintain it. There aren't a lot of hackers out there who can play with this class of hardware. But they're paying to maintain this stuff in Irix today, so it's not like that's a loss.
Where they really gain something is in all the other stuff that goes into a kernel that they don't have to worry about anymore and all the applications that are becoming available for Linux.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
What makes the Visual Workstations better than a Dell is their very customized video subsystems. I can't quote exact numbers, but the systems have ridiculously video high bandwidth, which makes them usable in video applications that traditional PC's would fall flat in.
Besides the video system, though, I think the rest of the appeal is the industrial design aspect. Cool looking (Non-translucent) cases, and sci-fi looking LCD displays.
I can't speak at how proprietary the hardware is, but if they write open source drivers for it so that they can install Linux, do you really care? Closed hardware doesn't bother me at all, but closed API's do, and if their drivers are GPL (or something close to it), and they don't try to close the thing up like Glide, everything is fine.
And it seems that they really are embracing Linux. Lets not forget their intent to release IRIX's journalling filesystem. This is no small deal: the lack of a journalling FS has been holding Linux back. Quite likely, they will phase out IRIX and slowly contribute to Linux those few high end features which it still lacks.
so that Linux can catch up to the big boys in the FS department. This is no small act, and I do hope that it is executed quickly.
With them releasing Linux boxes, we should atleast get drivers out of them (hopefully free), and hopefully they will support some of the big projects.
Anyone out there use these things for a living?
Did anyone else notice, or has it already been discussed, that in this article Belluzo says they'll be bringing ccNUMA support into Linux? ...
ccNUMA is definitely drool material - even better than Beowulf, and this would suggest that they are planning to have Linux running on machines in the 'Blue Mountain' (~6000 processor?) class
Seems to me that SGI may turn out to be the best thing to happen to Linux since usenet. After all, what have the three biggest (technical) problems with Linux been since it started getting mainstream acceptance?
1. Lack of a solid jfs
2. Lack of high-end graphics
3. Lack of support for *really* big, high-throughput hardware
All three of which SGI looks to be contributing.
I agree with the previous poster - you gotta love these guys.
"Images are incapable of repose." - Bachelard
I realize there are a decent amount of posts about why this strategy is good for Linux, but maybe a closer look reveals why this is so good.
SGI, currently, has two things Linux desperately needs. The first is a journaling file system. I don't think I really need to explain why this is a good thing; all it takes is one bluescreen with NT and you'll understand me completely. SGI's is mature and stable, and has a very good reputation among the workstation community. Nuff said.
The second, IMHO, is even more important. SGI has (again IMHO) the most outstanding implementation of thread-level parallel processing. Almost all the other platforms you care to look at (IBM, older Sequent, Sun) either depend on MPI coding or are designed using close-coupled SMP, which tend to reach their limits quickly. It seems SGI has profited greatly from their acquisition of Cray Research.
SGI has a great thread library which they have mapped to their NUMA implementation, which scales a little better than SMP does (I'll skip the technical explanation here in favor of the point). SGI's extensive knowledge with multiprocessing comes at the perfect time for Linux, which is this very minute undergoing heavy kernel modifications to better facilitate thread level parallelism.
SGI has so much to offer in terms of technical skill that Linux could absorb at this point in time. Make no mistake, this is a perfect opportunity for Linux to milk the expertise from SGI, who needs Linux to survive.
The opinions I post here have nothing to do with my employer.