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SGI's Linux Server
More details of SGI's upcoming Linux server have emerged. According to the article, SGI is already shipping a 4 processor machine, and plans to ship 8-way and 2-way machines at a later time. Both Linux and NT are available pre-installed. The servers look like they're not your mother's typical x86-based server, and come with some interesting hardware features that I didn't even know Linux supported (hot swap drives). Am I not well-informed, or is it possible SGI has some patches (that they're hopefully itching to give us)? Regardless, I'm glad to see a big Unix vendor shipping Linux, and touting it so highly.
[Note that SMP is very different from clustering, so forget all you've heard about Beowulf, Mosix, and such for this discussion.]
Yes, Linux supports SMP. If you have a bunch of user processes that are doing mostly user-space computation, then you should get a mostly linear speedup even with a 2.0 kernel. But if the processes depend on a bunch of kernel services, watch the kernel version carefully.
You see, with SMP the kernel has to be sure that two processors don't try to modify the same data structure at the same time so as to avoid confusion (e.g, deadlock or a crash). The 2.0 kernels supported SMP by putting one big lock on the kernel, so only one process can be doing something in the kernel at a time. One of the major features of 2.2 is that this one big lock was broken up, allowing Linux to scale far better. Unfortunately, there are still many places where the locks need to be broken up further, and work is ongoing.
I believe that it was such a locking issue that caused Linux problems in the Mindcraft benchmarks when multiple network cards were in use.
So the performance of SMP will vary depending on your application and your system. (I've heard, for example, that building the kernel on a 4-way box gave a 3.7 times speedup in one case, which is pretty good.)
Note that many of the commercial Unixes scale better than Linux (i.e., have finer grained locking). I know Solaris has a very good reputation for large numbers of processors. I would suspect that Irix must be good, based on the systems that SGI sells. Linux is getting there. Upto 4 CPUs should be fine for most tasks. I haven't heard reports of Linux with more than 4 SMP CPUs.
Not to burst anyone's bubble, but this system is just a re-skinned version of Intel's SC450NX server platform. The machine is made by Intel for system integrators. You can find the Intel information at http://developer.intel.com/desig n/servers/SC450NX/. The company I run sells systems based on these, and the placement of the status LEDs, the lock, and other things that I can see in the pictures in the PDF that's found in a comment above are exactly the same.
I'm kinda glad though - at least one distribution is becoming more or less the standard with which commercial vendors identify.
As long as all the goodies that Redhat gets are shared with the rest of the community ala GPL, I have no problem with that.
As a long time SGI advocate and user, it's good to hear this news - but like someone said - it sounds like their "server" doesn't have X yet, or OpenGL. In time, I hope...
Actually, the fbcon X server has been working on the VisWS for quite a while now.
:)
The new 1400L seems to be quite different than the VisWS, enough that I wouldn't call it a VisWS biled as a server - This one doesn't have the Cobalt graphis (of course), it has integrated SCSI, an emergency management port (monitoring stuff in some way), three hot swappable power supplies, and of course it installs RH as "server" by default
It's probably built with the same core UMA (Unified Memory Access) chips as the VisWS, but if you call it a rebranded VisWS, then I guess Compaq et al does the same thing, since their servers aren't that different from their high-end workstations - they use the same intel 440 GX chipset and such.
/El Niño
>Has always been available in linux...with scsi or >ide.
That doesn't mean it ever worked reliably.
The fellers down at SGI gave a talk at my school's LUG (Waashington State University) a while back and we had to telnet to it via serial port because there's no USB support in Linux, and this box has USB everything. So does anyone know if SGI is going to release all their patches to the public? I'm assuming they wouldn't release a inux box that you can't use a keyboard or mouse with.
-- Object known as a camera. Vintage uncertain, origin unknown. - Twilight Zone
Until they actually ship a modified version of Linux, they don't have to release any of their work. The GPL only applies to changes which are distributed.
funny enough... there are STILL a few .... unique... kernel messages left in the kernel. A few weeks ago I bought a few new d-link cards... Was having a few probs.. every now and then the damn d-link cards would just DIE!!! Im not sure why exactly.. The bios would not even see them as a device afterwords.. Anyhow..
the kernel said something like...
eth1: There is something not right
ohh well I dont remember exactly.. I do remember it was just enough to keep me from throwing the damn card out the window I can tell ya that.. hehe
That doesn't hold for stateful procesess though, since the SP cluster is JBOS(justa bunch'o servers.) utilizing message passing.
If you want the swapout anything anytime while the system is in any state, you have to have Sun's E10K, with memory draining, network interface and SCSI controller repathing to an alternate device on the system. Throw in the EMC Powerpath SCSI drivers, you could literally cut all but one SCSI cable going to the live active system and the box would would not miss a beat. And this is all on 1 node with 1 system image.
Will they use the Cobalt Chipset?
No.
Will they use the same Motherboards?
No.
Will this simply be "adding a drive sled bay" to a visual workstation?
No. It's not based on the VW architecture at all.
Will they be cutting back on the Video and Audio abilities?
Why does the price mentioned seem higer than the Visual Workstation (if you just adding a sled, but taking out all the video and audio stuff?)?
Well, the 2+1 redunant power supplies, for one thing. The hot-plug drive bays, for another. The 11 fans, for another. From what I've seen, it's a fairly well-engineered machine.
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
As much as I'd like to believe this, I think that contract provisions such as his would have come up in US vs. Microsoft.
That no representative of SGI has been called as a witness for the DOJ has no bearing on it then?
Cheers,
Joshua.
--jon. Postel is dead. May we all mourn his, and our, loss.
And you'll get one hell of an intel system for $14,000 from SGI, I reckon. Their pricing seems to be about inline with the other server vendors - Dell, IBM, Compaq - - - There is a premium involved, but as everyone points out, that premium equates to added bandwidth
This is not about building your box, this is about buying a box. Many companies (should I say most) buy systems, not build. And don't forget that we are talking about PIII-Xeon processors. Lat time I checked each cost like $2000
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you write let's say a kernel module or an X driver that doesn't
> use any GPL code, then you do NOT have to give the source away....
> There is such a module (or patch I don't remember well) for the diskonchip device.
For the new diskonchip device, which, by the way, is a piece of crap.
This is not about building your box, this is about buying a box. Many companies (should I say most) buy systems, not build. And don't forget that we are talking about PIII-Xeon processors with 2MB L2 cache. Last time I checked each cost like $2000.
This is a terrible article. I personally would
wait a few days for SGI to officially announce
their own product. I lost interest in this
article in the first paragraph, "It is the first
time SGI is using an operating system other than
its IRIX." What about Linux on the VWS or on
Indy's? Granted those are unsupported at the
moment. But even so, it's hardly SGI's first
time using an os other than IRIX. For Example:
- Unicos
- Unicos/Mk
- Windows NT Workstation 4
SGI is delivering what customers ask for. This
is neither bold nor brave. It makes sense. I
suggest the author of this article read the
Linux IPO howto faq, especially the part on
research. Interviewing 2 people is not a
substitute for understanding what you are
writing about.
-Anon
That's how many are in ASCII Red, granted it's a MPP system. I don't know how many are in each chassis, or OS (a UNIX variant) image, but the CPUs are Pentium Pros, which are the most scalable of the x86 line. Of course, the OS and applications have to scale also.
You don't need files > 2gig to support large databases. Oracle uses logical tablespaces to store data. Whenever you run out of space, just create another 2 gig file and add it to the tablespace. Actually this is the recommended way of storing large tables (according to the Oracle Press books), even on systems that support large files.
I'll bet that they've been doing some tinkering with the Linux kernel. I've noticed quite a few posts on the Linux kernel mailing list lately from IRIX programmers inside SGI.. I thought it was kinda interesting... SGI is a great company, and having them getting involved in Linux is like having a major league ballplayer join your softball team. :)
Unless you're 100% I/O bound on DMA controllers, I guarantee that NT and IRIX both will kick Linux in the *** on 4+ CPUs, since both have 100% reentrant multithreaded kernels, while the Linux kernel is not reentrant. This is changing, but for now we have to live with it on big boxes. (see the post Re: David Miller; I know he's done a lot of testing on 8+ CPUs and the scaling is quite horrible; Solaris SMP really sucks and it outperforms Linux about 2:1 on 14 CPUs)
Also, why the hell dont they make a move to the
EV6 with the k-7's... that will surely rock the house!
Read some pages on their site. They're migrating toward IA-64 and ditching MIPS within the next couple of years. This is one step in their migration. More than likely, they'll release one last round of Onyx2's and Origin 2000's based on the R12k CPU, and then we'll start seeing all new BIG machines. IA-32 is just their way of testing the waters.
Don't forget that Linux boxes with PCMCIA support have been able to hot-swap a variety of devices, including hard disks, for quite a while. Even if the hot swapping *isn't* handled by the RAID controller, it's not as suprising as it might sound.
The best thing about this is SGI "giving back" to the Open Source community. SGI has written some great software over the years. If we get just a piece of that, we should be grateful. It wouldn't take that much work to integrate SGI technology into something like the GIMP, or other great Open Source software.
What's especially great about this is that SGI seems willing to participate in Open Source advancement. It will be a great boon to see such a powerful name behind Open Source.
I spoke to an SGI insider about this a while back. His comment (anonymously) was that the issues that hold back an SGI "workstation" (ie., X with accelleration for the Visual Workstation) are mostly legal; apparently, SGI had to sign some agreement with Microsoft in order to get the information they needed to get NT working on the box.
According to this person, (Surprise!) Microsoft insisted on language to the effect that SGI wouldn't support a competing OS environment on the same hardware. SGI's strategy for getting around this is supposed to be to focus their Linux efforts on things that can be branded "servers" until the agreement runs out.
I don't know how true any of this is (I don't have enough contact with the source to establish how accurate their statements are), but it may well be that the technical issues in getting X working right on the Visual Workstation aren't the only problems that SGI faces.
Really eh? I noticed that too, and it was coming from some sort of IS research pundit to boot. Maybe she's pining for the days of restrictive AT&T source licenses and $1995.00 binary licenses?
I agree, SGI probably picked Linux because it made the best combo of economic and technical sense.
-M
My opinion is that you should use ' in possessive nouns.
Yup. I loaded Linux on an HP Netserver LHII with dual PPro and an HP NetRAID controller, which is really just an AMI Megaraid resold by HP as OEM equipment. RAID5 & hotswap. At the time there were no system utilities for monitoring the status of the drives under Linux, but I think AMI did release some a little while back.
It was also a repurposed NT server. It was a good feeling when I wiped NT off the hard drive. I haven't missed it once.
Well the only thing non-SGI in their boxes are probably the processors. All the stuff was developed by them and is probably only used by them, so thus there will be a higher cost. SGI's NT workstations also have the neat capability to use system RAM in many ways, i.e. VRAM or texture memory.
On sgi web site:
http://www.sgi.com/Products/PDF/2331.pdf
> 8 or more processors and files larger than 2gig.
> Which according to Linus probably ain't gonna happen soon.
8 or more CPUs? No problem; but can you afford the hardware? 8-CPU Intel boxes are moronically expensive.
>2gb files? Do it on an Alpha now; there is actually a pretty good chance of that getting into Linux for Intel pretty soon.
It could be just supply and demand...
Just becouse the managers ordering the computers know what Linux is dosn't mean they know what will happen on a Linux box with 8 Xenon IIIs.
My guess is SGI found a way to make it work but don't count out the "They'll buy it anyway" factor. It's not SGIs style to market to the idiot quotent but you never know.
I don't actually exist.
Cheers,
Joshua.
--jon. Postel is dead. May we all mourn his, and our, loss.
I can't offer "significant proof" yet, as the SGI 1400 doesn't appear on the external SGI web page. But it is not a Visual Workstation 320/540 without graphics - the 1400 is a new hardware configuration. As a previous poster mentioned, it has the standard Intel-based server options - integrated SCSI, redundant power supplies, etc. How do I know - I work there. :) There's a couple 1400s in my lab 100 feet away.
How do I know this - well, I work for SGI. :) There's a couple 1400s in my lab 100 feet away.
So, I guess, after review, the real questions are:
What are you at liberty to say?
I might offer some insight into this. SGI Linux servers were unofficially announced a while ago. That was their original decision. They want it to compete with NT. They want to impress the public and save their shares. They want to make a move, but they aren't sure what move.
If you have any familiarity with SGI, it's half dead. People are leaving--best people. Heck, SGI can't even get their Oracle database that holds customer data and all the servicing information and all to work with a reasonable latency (say, give a response consistantly under one minute).
These are the facts. Talk to anyone at SGI you know. Well, if they have any clue and can find employment elsewhere, they have probably left by now.
Another poster suggests that they are not running *BSD because of driver & applications issues. I do not think it is relevant. The decision to ship Linux boxes was not made by a technical person (who knows that FreeBSD has support for most of the hardware they're shipping), but by a marketing suit who has read a lot about Linux in a glossy idiotic magazine like Internet Week that someone left in company's toilet.
Face it: They're not shipping Linux because Linux is good. They're not shipping Linux because of any strategic alliances (they have none at the moment, the industry bails out, the place where I work throws away Challenge XLs--have you ever seen a Challenge XL?).
The are shipping Linux because of one simply reason: panic .
Now, don't get all excited. Wait for SGI to dump core, then savecore and icrash it and produce one nice big analysis.0.
PANIC STRING:
This appropriate quote covers mr. Po-ag's posts so well:
"You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can make a fool of yourself anytime. "
Actually, they don't seem much different in price from the Origin 200 servers running Irix. Why buy Intel when you can get purebred SGI?
D
----
And you didn't tell us?
The biggest question around here is "what do we do
if the patches aren't accepted?". That and the
usual big company run-arounds about "procedure"...
They have, with other manufacturers. It's apparently a standard part of the Windows licensing agreement.
Ahh, good.. I was waiting for this. I had the good luck of being able to sit in on an SGI non-disclosure agreement demo back in December of last year when this was being discussed.. Glad to see they finally came through on what they were promising. :)
Bowie
PROPAGANDA
Bowie J. Poag
To quote the last paragraph from the article:
So maybe they will give the hot-swap patches...?
Expect more super-duper Linux announcements from big companies as we get nearer to showtime. Watch with glee as they try to out-do each other in Linux support. It's gonna be an awesome show! Wheeee!
Wonder what they're doing to make 4-proc efficient? 8-proc? Good question. The file system and networking improvements are supposed to allow Linux to scale into that range, but that's only a best guess. I've never seen or heard of anyone demonstrating resonably good >4-way scalability on an intel platform with any operating system. (NUMA machines don't count) Last time I checked, NT couldn't scale past 4procs worth a damn either. What's SGI smoking. Whatever it is, Compaq and a few others must be smoking it too since they're planning 8way xeons as well. 8way K-6 would be a much better value proposition since the EV-6 architecture can scale to 14procs with reasonable performance.
--Shoeboy
Has always been available in linux...with scsi or ide.
Of course, for hot swap to be useful the system needs to be able to deal intelligently with failed drives, generally via RAID. I'm running Linux on a hot-swappable Compaq Proliant 1600 using software RAID-1, which works just fine. I've done the pull-a-running-drive test and watched the RAID driver rebuild the RAID system after adding the drive back in. It's pretty cool.
I believe you mean the new K7, not the K6.
I have to admit they've done better with the case on this one compared to the VW320/540. I especially dig the perforated metal on the front.
Typo, sorry. I'll just nip off and shoot myself now.
There is no mention of any nice Linux extras, just that it uses RH6.0.
DWR is Ajax for Java
The SGI machines offering hot swap isn't that big of a deal. Any many linux systems can support it and any that support a RAID controller that supports it, will support it. (Wow, that was a lousy grammatical construction!)
I meant that there are a bunch of RAID controllers that handle the hot-swapping themselves, including the automagic rebuilding of failed drives in a RAID-5 configuration, for example. I think the Mylex controllers are an example of that.
Two years ago I managed to get Linux running on one of HP's high end (at the time) multiproc machines (it had two Pentium 200's I think). For the life of me I can't remember what drive controller was in it -- it was a repurposed NT server, not something purchased new -- but you could pull drives out just fine...
I'd guess SGI's just using a hardware RAID solution, not a software one, which is the only thing that would need real Linux support.
Wonder what they're doing to make 4-proc efficient? 8-proc?
I don't mean to be redundant, several people have pointed out that Linux already supports hot-swappable drives. This is true, to an extent. In a RAID configuration, the RAID controller is responsible for handling drives that are swapped in and out. In our Compaq ProLiant 3000 server, we have 3 X 9 GIG SCSI hard drives in a RAID 5 array. This server could run almost ANY OS (ours runs NetWare), providing that support for the RAID controller is available. Of course, in order to handle hot swapping it also requires that the hardware like drive bays, drives, and cables adhere to the standard used by the RAID controller. The Compaq Proliant has drives with nice lights on the front and tabs that allow the drives to be removed without tools, and a modular cage to hold them. As far as I know these are primarily proprietary solutions specific to each of many server vendors (HP/Compaq/IBM and others).
In order for hot swap ability, a company like SGI has to offer hardware designed to work together (which they already do on their other server lines). They would then have to write or modify a driver to allow Linux to use the RAID controller, it doesn't require any great change in the OS. While its great news for Linux that SGI is building servers with Linux pre-installed, they haven't contributed any significant amount to the OSS. However, I hope that they will contribute to, and perhaps speed development on making Linux more SMP capable.
Spyky
Why are people here going 'maybe SGI will give us the patches.'
Unless the patches are 5 lines long (or less), the GPL demands them.
And isn't that what the whole GPL thing is about? The 'freedom' of the code? So go get your free code.
(Quit being so meek. Enforce your rights)
"Becknell is not convinced it is the best bet.
There are many other Unixes they could adopt that are already scalable, high-end, high-available, designed for performance. Linux is not even fully SMP [define.gif] yet."
Err.. many other Unixes like Irix for instance?! Even if we put aside the the yeas and nays of the SMP debate - how much imagination does it take to realise that when a company that has a Unix of _of_its_very_own_ looks at another unix they're looking at a bigger picture. Even if we take the most cynical position and assume SGI are just hedging their bets this is a win for linux. SGI have recognised the value of open source - not just its conciderable technical merit (potential) but also its "friendliness" to corporations that want to be part of it.
AdamT
... with eskimo chains i tatto my brain all the way...
Thought I'd mention, with SCSI drives its also very easy to get Linux to rescan the bus. I have a shell script on my system at home that does that, because I'm a knob and forget to turn on my CDR drive more often than not. Flip it on, run the script and voila! No reboot.
Of course, kiddies, don't try this at home. SCSI isn't really supposed to support powering on a device after the system is powered up, unless it specifically says it can. YMMV.
I'm interested in seeing where FireWire goes from that standpoint. I like the fact that you can disconnect them at will. (Well assuming your OS isn't going to complain!)
Somebody enlighten me as to why I'd spend $8000 for An entry-level system with one CPU and minimal RAM... Or A more typical configuration, with two CPUs and more RAM, starts at $14,000.
I love SGI machines, but Linux is free so what am I paying for? I could put one hell of an dual Intel system together for $14,000.
Nice try. However, today you can only get a 12-way RS/6000, and today's AIX 4.3.2 does not provide the ability to hot swap processors, memory or cards.
We'll also have to wait and see if IBM provides the patches to the Linux kernel to support all that or open hardware documentation for others to implement it. I doubt it (but would love to be proven wrong.)
Quick summery of comments [pays to read before posting]
It's a hardware thing. Accually thats a good thing [tm] software solutions cost in CPU time.
Remember the origianl Amigas? Everything done in coprocesors. Let the Amiga do things much more powerful PC couldn't.
Anyway it's allwase wise to make shure there is sorce code to ask for. As with this case there is no code and then there is the BeOs/Linux hybred that apparently dosn't even use Linux.
I don't actually exist.
- a drive
- a RAID controller
- a SCSI cable
- a SCSI controller on the host
Of course, on many machines you're still prone to motherboard failure at this point, which is why you're probably hooking this up to a Sun E-series box. Make sure the two SCSI controllers that the RAID box is hooked up to are on different I/O boards, so that if one I/O board dies, the other is still there. And of course make sure you have at least two separate CPU/Memory boards, so if one of those dies, the other is available.cjs
The world's most portable OS: http://www.netbsd.org.
http://www.sgi.com/Products/PDF/2331.pdf
Will they use the Cobalt Chipset?
On a server? Are you kidding? What on earth for?
Will they be cutting back on the Video and Audio abilities?
If SGI follows past practice, then I would say yes, but only as applicable to making the server a functional workstation: SGI servers have almost always been headless. Video out on a Challenge (and most of the Orgin series) was a port for a dumb terminal.
But for media serving, I would imagine it would be more than up to the task.
If you have any familiarity with SGI, it's half dead. People are leaving--best people.
If you have any familiatity with SGI, you'd realise they posted $158 million *NET* profit for last quarter.
Strange behaviour for a corporation which is supposed to be half dead. Perhaps someone forgot to tell them this?
Heck, SGI can't even get their Oracle database that holds customer data and all the servicing information and all to work with a reasonable latency (say, give a response consistantly under one minute).
So who the hell wants to run an Oracle database on an SGI? Oracle databases are boring grunt work fit for Suns, not high-performance SGIs.
Seriously, I suggest you acquaint yourself with MediaBase, an app that finds itself more than suitable runnging on an SGI server.
Another poster suggests that they are not running *BSD because of driver & applications issues. I do not think it is relevant. The decision to ship Linux boxes was not made by a technical person
How doe we know this? Granted, FreeBSD is open source, but I think it's far too likely that most of the work had been done already--on the engineers' own time with Linux. This is mighty fast turnaround time for a server-class computer for SGI.
I figure time has the most to do with it. Eventually, I'd expect FreeBSD to be up and running on one of these servers.
Face it: They're not shipping Linux because Linux is good. They're not shipping Linux because of any strategic alliances (they have none at the moment, the industry bails out, the place where I work throws away Challenge XLs--have you ever seen a Challenge XL?).
*horrified gasp* Are you kidding! Are they insane? Oh, the *humanity*!
Save me one! I'll pay for shipping! Those are fabulous machines (consume more power than godknowswhat, but *still!*)
In closing, however: I find your comments largely flawed and irrelevant to SGI, a company which has performed miracles both technical and visual (and now, coporate). People have been insisting that SGI is dead for nearly two years now.
I think it's time for an acceptance of reality: SGI thrives, and you are quite simply wrong, and have been wrong all along.
_
Talking about hot swap drives, I really hope Richard Gooch's
devfs patch will go into the official kernel soon.
Imagine the fun of unplugging the first scsi drive, and
finding out that all drive device names changed on
next reboot (sdb becomes sda, sdc becomes sdb, etc.)
I don't understand why some people have strong objections to
devfs in the kernel, even as an OPTIONAL module.
I think one of the main reasons behind SGI's recent embrace of x86 is it's compatibility with existing software. It's expensive to maintain a hardware and software division (just ask Apple) so in going with x86 they can put on existing software with basically no porting. Porting IRIX to x86 would cost them alot of money and probably wouldnt pay off in the long run, but using linux and NT, operating systems more people are familiar with, they stand to make a much larger profit from these boxes, because their investment is almost entirely in hardware, with a few linux patches to get their machines running well. Supporting NT means that 3,000 dollar program suite you bought for your old systems can be used on your brand new SGI machines, supporting linux means you basically have a support base of thousands of developers and gurus. You dont have either of those with IRIX.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
too bad oracle hasn't released oracle for linux on alpha!
I stand ready to put my foot in my mouth if this has changed, however!
Different computer.
Notice the lack of the cobalt chipset, for starters... it is possible for a company to ship two systems based on the same CPU and have radically different machines in the end.
Disclaimer: I know little about the Linux kernel. This stuff might all be nonsense.
What if any new functionality has been implemented by SGI as modules, loaded on demand by kerneld? They can be shipped as binaries only without violating the GPL. Since they're not techically part of the kernel, they don't have to be covered by the same license.
Not that I'm complaining; any improvement to linux is a good thing. With the resources they have, and some of the development work they have under IRIX, linux should come on in leaps and bounds.
--
I guess there shouldn't be a post asking if this runs Linux. :)
But I suppose someone will metion an ancient mythical story that was redone from the moster's point of view.....
-cpd
i noticed that the "consultant" they interviewed seemed to think that linux didn't fully support SMP. I thought it did. Was I wrong?
get your dirty sig off me, you filthy APE!
Chances are, SGI servers running Linux offer hotswap capabilities thru dedicated hardware. But it's also possible to use software only solutions. There are a few requirements :
:-)
- the hardware must handle it, I mean, you must be able to add/remove a drive to a IDE bus/SCSI chain without everything going mad. Most hardware I met doesn't care if you remove a (umount'ed) drive.
- the software must handle it. With IDE drive, there are ways to force Linux to redetect hard disk geometry (with 2.2 kernels, use modules, with 2.0 kernels, there are unofficial kernel patches to do that. check http://www.enix.org/~skaya/ for an ugly patch allowing to do hotswap with your secondary IDE channel with 2.0.36 kernels)
If you want really good performance/reliability, go for RAID-5. Hardware support is not required anymore. Linux supports software RAID-5 since quite a long time (with the appropriate raidtools), but on-the-fly reconstruction is a recent update. And if you want things like LVM ("oh dear, my 80 gigs pool is full, nah, just add another 18 gigs scsi drive, and poof! I have 18 gigs more free"), you will have to play with latest 2.3.* kernels. It's a domain where Linux hasn't reached (yet) the level of others like HP-UX, but it's improving (it's a big work, because there are filesystems consideration underneath - how do I resize an ext2 filesystem, etc)
A last note about SMP Linux boxen : according to Alan Cox if I remember well, Linux scales very well to 2 CPUs, poorly to 4, and not at all to 8. To solve that, give 'em linux coders octo-xeon servers to play with, I promise they will do their best
Let's settle this silly SMP debate once and for all: get one of these machines to run NT and Linux (or swap out hard drives, I don't care how it's done as long as it's fair...) and test SMP. Preferably with the same applications, but whatever measures of SMP performance that can be done on both NT and Linux... (of course Povray, maybe web serving or whatever apps are sexy this week...)
I know that Linux doesn't have some of the cool features that IRIX does, but it should soundly whip NT, since NT 5 *might* have some of the essential features that UNIX has had forever... (note to dissenters: sure, I'll give you examples if you like...)
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I can't find any pictures with the story. Is there anything on SGI's site about this?
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
This is not a Visual Workstation. It is a completely different beast...it _is_ a server.
According to this person, (Surprise!) Microsoft insisted on language to the effect that SGI wouldn't support a competing OS environment on the same hardware. SGI's strategy for getting around this is supposed to be to focus their Linux efforts on things that can be branded "servers" until the agreement runs out.
As much as I'd like to believe this, I think that contract provisions such as his would have come up in US vs. Microsoft.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
I would need to see some significant proof to believe that this hardware is substantually diffrent than the existing Visual Workstation they sell running Windows NT.
No one has mentioned that they have built a totally new hardware configuration, based on Intel CPU's. Therefore, it's only reasonable to conclude that they are mearly installing Linux on the Visual Workstations, and calling it a "server."
The differance between a server and a workstation is in the eyes of the beholder. If you think just calling it "server" makes it diffrent, I would have to point to the countless users who run httpd, ftpd, nfsd, etc on thier "workstations." But, to me, it's neither, it's just a piece of hardware. What they do with that hardware doesn't change the fact that I believe that the hardware is the same.
So, even if it's the same as a Visual Workstation (which is just a "product name," and doesn't automagically make the product incapable of acting as a server), but even if they took that box, and yanked the video card out, it's still the same hardware, and Linux is know to run on it, and X doesn't run on it yet, so, I just don't see anything new here.
Hot swapping drives is more of a matter of hardware than software. All you need is an sca drive and a good back plane. Now what would be useful would be if they were seen as removable media. Otherwise you need a SAFTE backplane and a RAID controller to get much use out of it.
Of course you could what I do when I want to remove an external jaz drive with out powering down. (Note don't try this if you have anything else attached the scsi card.) It works well for hot swapable drives, but I've not found much use for it in real life.
from scsi.c
* Usage: echo "scsi remove-single-device 0 1 2 3" >/proc/scsi/scsi
* with "0 1 2 3" replaced by your "Host Channel Id Lun".
* Usage: echo "scsi add-single-device 0 1 2 3" >/proc/scsi/scsi
* with "0 1 2 3" replaced by your "Host Channel Id Lun".
Note: You really shouldn't be doing this so don't blame me if it goes wrong. Not all removable drives are hot swapable, and not all hot swap drives/carriers are created equal.
IANALBIPOOGL (I am not a Lawyer, but I play one on GrokLaw.)
The bus connecting the memory controller and RAM moves data to and from main memory at an astounding 3.2GB per second-six times faster than an AGP 2X graphics bus.-- This would be very good for a server as well.
Combining the most advanced graphics engine available for Windows NT, unheard-of memory bandwidth, and a multiprocessor interface, the memory controller ensures that your most critical data is on the shortest possible path.The tightly coupled Cobalt graphics engine performs lightning- fast 3D geometry, sophisticated shading, lighting, hardware-accelerated texturing, and pixel fill.-- Clearly, they are selling the advantages of thier chipset as "better video preformance." But, when you increas memory I/O rates, and general communication bandwidth in a system, that's going to help out a lot for servers too. Intel Pentium III Xeon Processors Up to four Intel Pentium III Xeon microprocessors provide the pinnacle of Intel processor performance. Your Silicon Graphics 540 workstation features the fastest Intel Pentium III Xeon processors available, with performance-enhancing features such as a dual independent (cache and system) bus TM architecture, dynamic execution, Intel MMX multimedia technology, and a closely coupled Level 2 cache bus running at the full speed of the processor, with cache capacities up to 2MB. -- Clearly, they have a 4 CPU Intel Xeon system, called the "Visual Workstation" that comes very clsoe to thier new Linux/Intel Server claims.
This is all why I suspect that it's the same. Now, there are some features that the Cobalt chipset gives them that will help a server, and it's a lot of work to develop a chipset for a system at this level, so I doubt they will be using something diffrent for the new "server." But at the same time, there are a lot of video and audio subsystems in the Visual Workstation that they could probably remove. And, the focus could be shifted to network capability and away from Video.
So, I guess, after review, the real questions are:
So, coming back at this, I have to think your right, it's a diffrent box, because if they claim "hot swap" they probably have sleds for it. (SGI sleds are WAY to expensive BTW). And, given that one significant differance will probably be in the case, it makes me wonder what the other differances will be... because there may well be many, this might be totally new box, and I sure wish I knew what the specs really were.
Gotta remember to preview... hate it when I forget to put the bold off tag in.. only meant for the first line to be bold :P
In order to sell at even close to the same price as the Windows NT version of their server, they would need to use either a -VERY- cheap Unix (and most of those aren't scalable, high-end, or offer high availability), OR one of the *BSD's, which, for all their merits (which are considerable), don't compete with NT in terms of driver support or software availability.
IMHO, SGI's powers-that-be are no idiots. I believe they picked Linux as the optimal OS to sell alongside NT. That doesn't mean "best" at X, Y or Z, it means optimal, when considering ALL the factors SGI would need to take into consideration.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
First of all, hot swap, isn't nescessairly new. Lots of mylex controllers support this and you can buy boxes from VALinux that have this feature. I believe that the VARServer 3500 is one of them that comes with a raid 5.
/*+ parallel */ hint makes them about 3 times faster or so. Starting multiple SQL*Loader sessions imports the data about 3 times as fast also. I'd imagine that its waiting on the disk in these cases as we unfortunately only have one disk controller in this system. In any case, odds are we'll have to upgrade out of linux sometime in the future if it doesn't get support for 8 or more processors and files larger than 2gig. Which according to Linus probably ain't gonna happen soon.
As for SMP, it baffles me the comment about linux not having full SMP support. I run Oracle on 4x Xeon at work (with the parallel options installed of course) and it works wonderful. Giving queries the
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
This looks like a nice public relations press piece that SGI was happy to get out. Server? Thier Visual Workstation billed as a server? Sure sounds to me like they don't have X working yet.
We knew it would make a good Linux box last year when we saw the memory I/O, and chipset, and all the fancy hardware. Nothing new there, that happened last year. We knew Linux would run on it when kernel 2.2.0 came out and had Visual Workstation patches in it. Nothing new there, that happened last winter.
So, now, we get "news" that SGI has an Intel Linux Server... If that means they are just now getting it installed right, that's sort of slow progress, considering how long ago the first reports of it running were.
Maybe I am just in a bad mood this morning, but, what this story says to me is "Well, we still haven't got X to work, we promised OpenGL, and we don't even have X working yet... We can't get enough people working on it, it's taking way too long, what can we do? I know, let's get some press on it running Linux again, call it a 'server,' and maybe we'll look like we did something good."
Don't get me wrong, I like that SGI is supporting the Linux community. I just don't see any big reason to get excited by this specific story.
First if you unmount a scsi drive with an SCA connector you can pull it out hot, raid or not. This is not something new.
Now my main point I want to make is that the RS/6000s running linux is a much bigger deal. (Yes linux is running on RS/6000s) How does 32 processors sound? Hot swappable processor/memory/drives/cards? RS/6000s will autodetect bad processors and turn them off. When you come into work and your computer tells you processor 5 has been turned off and you replace it, add some ram, and put a new video card in all without ever rebooting your computer that's impressive.
Reasons to reboot a RS/6000:
1. You are moving it to another state
2. All of your processors failed at the same time
3. Your UPS just caught on fire
4. Oh wait, there are no more reasons
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human.