Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

SGI to drop Irix for Linux

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the changing-directions dept.

bpdlr (who admits to being a PC Week writer) sent us a story that proclaims that SGI Will Drop IRIX in exchange for some little no-name penguin oriented OS that nobody has heard of. I'm hearing rumors of a new Linux based mega server coming out of SGI, as well as some hugely scalable systems. Interesting stuff.

4 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. Make it clear, this is just for Merced, not Mips. by Ricdude · · Score: 4

    Simple point of clarity. Also a minor goof in the article:

    "Linux is a 32-bit operating system and does not scale beyond four processors."

    A suppose those alpha types have just been wasting 32 bits this whole time, eh? =)

    --
    How's my programming? Call 1-800-DEV-NULL
  2. There are more surprises in the pipe by HeUnique · · Score: 3

    Well, I cannot reveal my sourced, but:

    * SGI plan to modify Linux to run on 64 & up processors..
    * They're porting Linux to MIPS (not just the R3000, think MUCH bigger numbers - R10000 & up)
    * And some more surprises.

    As soon as I'll have more info, I'll post it on /.

    --
    Hetz (Heunique)
  3. Re:4 cpu's and 32 bits only? by jerodd · · Score: 3
    Linux doesn't scale very well beyond two CPUs, and beyond four, adding more CPUs can sometimes make things worse. Thus, it can't scale to 16 CPUs.

    Ultra Penguin doesn't let user space programs run in 64-bit mode. This makes it rather useless for 64-bit applications. AlphaLinux can, but the gcc/gas code generator for the Alpha is not very good--thus AlphaLinux is slower than NT (which is shameful).

    We've still got a lot of work to do, but it's good to see SGI's announcement--they can give us some help on the high end (as they've already done with things such as their large-memory patches).

    Cheers,
    Joshua.

    --
    --jon. Postel is dead. May we all mourn his, and our, loss.
  4. Makes sense for SGI, Sun, IBM, HP... by HenryFlower · · Score: 5
    Questions:
    1. Do you make your money off of hardware, support, consulting, and add-on software, or on your proprietary OS?
    2. Are there unique strengths your company has? (IBM=global enterprise services, SGI=visualization, Sun=network is the computer)
    3. In the short or medium term, are you shifting to an Intel hardware strategy (ia32, ia64)? (SGI, HP, IBM?)
    4. In the short term, can you live with less than enterprise level? (SGI)
    Why spend oodles of money developing the OS whose only function is to create a market for your hardware, services, unique value, if you can spend less money developing those features into Linux? In the final analysis, your competitive strength is not your OS (especially SGI, IBM, HP; Sun seems to be more tied to Solaris), and it is defocusing to pretend that the OS does anything more than help you get into the market where you strengths show.

    The problem for the moment for IBM, Sun, HP, is that Linux is seen mostly as an Intel solution, and that it doesn't scale up to enterprise levels. But it makes perfect sense for SGI to phase out Irix in favor of a Linux with all the support for visualization that plays to SGI's strengths. And it makes sense for the rest to shift R&D from proprietary OSs, into Linux, to develop the enterprise level features and strength on non-Intel platforms to allow them to phase out AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, etc.

    This is a clear win for Linux (witness XFS, etc.), and we ought to encourage this as much as possible.