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According to Compaq
Joseph DiLascio has written up a recent speech/interview with a Compaq engineer, dicussing their Linux plans. Given recent news about what's going over there, very interesting read.
According to Compaq Joseph
DiLascio
11 Sep 99
At the last FLUX (Florida Linux Users' Exchange) meeting, the guest speaker was an engineer from Compaq who came to discuss the company's support of Linux on the Alpha processor. With all the discussion on Slashdot recently I thought I'd try to answer some of the questions brought up, because I think the people inside Compaq pushing Linux on Alpha are doing good things.. despite what anyone may think of the company as a whole.
1. What's Compaq's "OS plan"? (Are they dropping Tru64 and moving to Linux.. etc.) In the server area, at least, they're focusing on three:
1a. What about Linux on x86? Not likely to be really supported by them any time soon. They make good money with SCO and that's what they'll keep trying to do.
2. What's the deal with this new C/Fortran compiler? (Are they using glibc.. Is it GPLd.. etc.) A number of customers liked the idea of Linux on the Alpha, but didn't like the performance and/or lack of source-compatibility with other Unices in the area of threading, etc. of GCC and the standard libs[1]. So Compaq figured it would be a good idea to make the development tools consistent between Tru64 and Linux... so they undertook the task of porting their Tru64 compiler and runtimes (no, not glibc) which is what that story on Slashdot was all about. The result is code that more fully exploits the power of the Alpha processor. As far as the GPL... the Alpha people tend to prefer BSD-ish licenses; as far as opening up the compiler and libs.. not right now, but maybe someday.
3. Does Compaq really give a damn about freedom and openness.. or are they just jumping on the bandwagon in the hopes of quick profit? The impression I got was a bit of both. They've already released source and hardware specifications to get Linux running onAlpha... but they can't necessarily do that for every component of their systems (i.e. video controllers which aren't Compaq's, but come from other companies). Yes, they're out to make money... but, like many of the other big players who have been getting into the Linux game (IBM, etc.), there are people inside the company that like Linux and free/open software for what it is, not just because it'll make them a buck.
3a. Isn't Compaq a slave to MS like so many other hardware vendors? Not when it comes to servers (see #1). I don't think they're looking at putting Linux on desktops at the moment (like Dell seems to be). Compaq and Microsoft do go a long way back, and the relationship apparently is a great one for both of them.
4. Will they kill Alpha if/when IA-64 becomes viable? The three main goals of the Alpha are:
4a. Will the loss of NT on Alpha affect the viability of the Alpha platform? Not likely. NT on Alpha wasn't selling very well (but that isn't all the fault of the Alpha people *ahem*MS*cough*).
So it looks like Compaq's support is a pretty good thing for the Linux community on the whole (at least, for the adoption of Linux at the high end... those who value freedom (open code, etc.) above all else may not be satisfied). That doesn't mean I'll be buying a desktop PC from them any time soon... but the Alpha is a neat processor and Linux can do neat things on it. Advancing the development of 64-bit Linux programs and Linux in general is something I personally can respect and appreciate.
Final note: The above information may or may not be completely accurate. I base all this on my impressions of the talk and Q&A session with a representative of Compaq who spoke at the last FLUX meeting. If you know of any errors, please let me know.
Also, thanks to the other FLUXers on the mailing list for their thoughts. [1] - One of the more interesting parts of the presentation was a historical view of the development of "Unix". I personally learned quite a bit about what makes up the thing we call "Linux" today. One thing Linux currently lacks is a 100% complete kernel threads implementation. Pthreads are mostly there but they don't work the same way as on other Unices, and Solaris threads (arguably more "standard" than pthreads among many software vendors) aren't there at all.
11 Sep 99
At the last FLUX (Florida Linux Users' Exchange) meeting, the guest speaker was an engineer from Compaq who came to discuss the company's support of Linux on the Alpha processor. With all the discussion on Slashdot recently I thought I'd try to answer some of the questions brought up, because I think the people inside Compaq pushing Linux on Alpha are doing good things.. despite what anyone may think of the company as a whole.
1. What's Compaq's "OS plan"? (Are they dropping Tru64 and moving to Linux.. etc.) In the server area, at least, they're focusing on three:
- Tru64 on Alpha for high-end, high-performance, high-etc. applications
- Linux on Alpha for not-as-high-end-etc.-etc.
- SCO on x86 for.. well.. the x86 market
1a. What about Linux on x86? Not likely to be really supported by them any time soon. They make good money with SCO and that's what they'll keep trying to do.
2. What's the deal with this new C/Fortran compiler? (Are they using glibc.. Is it GPLd.. etc.) A number of customers liked the idea of Linux on the Alpha, but didn't like the performance and/or lack of source-compatibility with other Unices in the area of threading, etc. of GCC and the standard libs[1]. So Compaq figured it would be a good idea to make the development tools consistent between Tru64 and Linux... so they undertook the task of porting their Tru64 compiler and runtimes (no, not glibc) which is what that story on Slashdot was all about. The result is code that more fully exploits the power of the Alpha processor. As far as the GPL... the Alpha people tend to prefer BSD-ish licenses; as far as opening up the compiler and libs.. not right now, but maybe someday.
3. Does Compaq really give a damn about freedom and openness.. or are they just jumping on the bandwagon in the hopes of quick profit? The impression I got was a bit of both. They've already released source and hardware specifications to get Linux running onAlpha... but they can't necessarily do that for every component of their systems (i.e. video controllers which aren't Compaq's, but come from other companies). Yes, they're out to make money... but, like many of the other big players who have been getting into the Linux game (IBM, etc.), there are people inside the company that like Linux and free/open software for what it is, not just because it'll make them a buck.
3a. Isn't Compaq a slave to MS like so many other hardware vendors? Not when it comes to servers (see #1). I don't think they're looking at putting Linux on desktops at the moment (like Dell seems to be). Compaq and Microsoft do go a long way back, and the relationship apparently is a great one for both of them.
4. Will they kill Alpha if/when IA-64 becomes viable? The three main goals of the Alpha are:
- Speed
- Performance
- Going Fast
4a. Will the loss of NT on Alpha affect the viability of the Alpha platform? Not likely. NT on Alpha wasn't selling very well (but that isn't all the fault of the Alpha people *ahem*MS*cough*).
So it looks like Compaq's support is a pretty good thing for the Linux community on the whole (at least, for the adoption of Linux at the high end... those who value freedom (open code, etc.) above all else may not be satisfied). That doesn't mean I'll be buying a desktop PC from them any time soon... but the Alpha is a neat processor and Linux can do neat things on it. Advancing the development of 64-bit Linux programs and Linux in general is something I personally can respect and appreciate.
Final note: The above information may or may not be completely accurate. I base all this on my impressions of the talk and Q&A session with a representative of Compaq who spoke at the last FLUX meeting. If you know of any errors, please let me know.
Also, thanks to the other FLUXers on the mailing list for their thoughts. [1] - One of the more interesting parts of the presentation was a historical view of the development of "Unix". I personally learned quite a bit about what makes up the thing we call "Linux" today. One thing Linux currently lacks is a 100% complete kernel threads implementation. Pthreads are mostly there but they don't work the same way as on other Unices, and Solaris threads (arguably more "standard" than pthreads among many software vendors) aren't there at all.
Joseph, all Slashdot contributors now receive *free t-shirts* from Copyleft. To get yours, please send your shipping address and shirt size to roblimo@slashdot.org.
What makes you think Alpha is going to stand still for the three years till 2nd-gen IA64?
Until Linux includes enterprise functionality like JFS, LVM, proper threads, and the like, it will only be a little helper.
One of Compaq's engineers wrote a Linux driver for one of their RAID cards (SMART-raid?). Evidently, upper management let him release his code.
They might not be giving out press releases, but they probably have lots of Linux fans in their enterprise server group.
At a presentation for my computer graphics class, one of the individuals involved in the production of Toy Story (the way he talked he was the master of Pixar but his name wasn't very high in any of the credits) came to talk and show videos. I believe there were 200 suns working on rendering for about two years. They said it was more economical than buying a cray.
I don't know what an Onyx is or if it was even available in those speeds when the movie was rendered. Toy story was made with some pretty cpu intensive effects, NOT things that can currently be made realtime. Although he did say if moore's law proceeded we would be able to render toy story in real time by... 2005 I think he said. (The presentation was in 1996 I think).
that was a deficiency in the earlier libc5.
glibc aka libc6 has built-in posix threads. so this problem should be solved.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
A bit more information on COMPAQ, Alphas, and Linux can be found in the UK Register here.
Especially interesting is the fact that even when IA64 comes out, Alphas are still expected to be running faster.
--
"May I have ten thousand marbles, please?"
It sucks that I got rated down as a troll - but really, of the innovative things being done with Linux by Compaq, the Itsy should come out near the top of the list.
Why can't we get a palmtop that runs Linux?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I had the impression that the "threading" being talked about here is the threading model as made available in userland (e.g., Solaris's model with N threads per process implemented atop M LWPs) rather than the degree to which the kernel itself is multi-threaded.
I was under the impression that the SVR4.0 kernel Sun started with had neither MP nor userland threading support, and that Sun added both of them. (Yes, there were SVR4.x releases that had both MP and threading - I think there were even SVR4.0 versions with them - but, as far as I know, that wasn't what Sun started with; as of when I left Sun in 1988 we were getting pre-release loads of SVR4 from AT&T.)
I would be curious to see a transcript or some paper of Linus making an absolute fool of himself by saying this. The Linux threading model is not terribly clean, and there are still way too many huge locks in the current kernels. Solaris thread granularity leaves Linux's in the dust; Linux had kernel threading retrofitted instead of woven into the OS like Solaris or even BeOS.
I apologize.... You know those really COOL new Sprit PCS phones, lets install linux on them and beowolf the fuckers. Than would be AWSUM!
That hurt :(
Bullshit, Give me the name of a Linux box on the network I can ping that is being used in Production.
Compaq (internally) is the land of Windows NT, except for the bits that came from Digital and Tandem, and they ain't runnin' Linux either...
um, gee, you think they ain't going to use a firewall??????
Ungh
The article was not saying that Linux didn't have threads. It was saying that Linux threads were not compatible with the threads provided by other Unices. And that's true.
And if you want numbers about linux threads, trawl through the lkml archives. There was a discussion about this not so long ago.
I recently attended a presentation by some Compaq folks and they claimed they are trying to get all the major Linux distributions onto the Alpha.
SCO raised their license fees, and (theoretically) passed the margin dollars on to their partners.
Some hardware vendors (like Compaq) have continued to back SCO. These vendors tended to be the ones that had the largest base of x86 *NIX sales prior to the general acceptance of Linux.
Some software vendors jumped to platforms like AIX / RS/6000 to maintain their high margins.
Most of the others who have embraced Linux had little or no share of the preceding *NIX market on Intel.
I would guess that the people that embraced Linux and include a service component in their marketing strategy are generally making more money than they did in SCO. The rest are hoping that the SCO market doesn't collapse.
I find it interesting that most people I talk to about SCO qualify most of their comments in revenue terms. That ought to help us understand why the vendors are still supporting it. It also gives us an idea of what would be required in order to displace SCO as an OS platform, if that is what we wanted to do.
-- Dave Aiello
Don't get me wrong...I'm not saying that Toy Story wasn't impressive, its just that it fit the example of what I was saying.
Onyx's are SGI's gift to the movie industry. They are large servers that do very well with graphics/special effects rendering. Most of the movies with heavy fx in them use Onyx's, for example Twister.
With the example of Toy Story, and the amount of machines they had to use (I remember when Sun had a story on their site about it, they were using Sparc 20's which at the time of the movie with the options they had would cost about $20000). Using 200 sparc 20's at US$20000 would cost about US$4million. You could probably do the same thing with 3 to five Onyx's which at that time cost around US$200000, so figure 5 and you still are at half the budget of the sparcs.
I am sure that Pixar got some good kickback from Sun on the machinery because Sun used that as a huge advertising gimic, so that would save the budget on that movie, but it still doesn't account for the fact that if you were just to go out and buy the machinery, you wouldn't be saving anything.
I talked to someone who used to do film remastering at one of the imaging giants here in Rochester. He said that they used three SGI Onyx's and it was more power than they would ever need for removing the dust and scratches off the last master of the movies turning it into the final master. They didn't do any special fx with them, but they did remaster every single frame for a large number of movies (any movie shot on this company's film) and they Onyx's work much more efficiently than any Sun solution they could get that competed in price with buy the three Onyx's (I think he said they paid US$200000 a machine).
Here's a link to the new Onyx's. So that you can read the specs on them.
---
"Everybody knows the moon's made of cheese," Wallace.
All right, my first non AC comment, and I get moderated down to -1. Come on, you idiots, it was supposed to be funny! And I thought all funny comments got moderated up. Jeez..
Is the 2nd Gen. 64 bit intel even still x86?
:).
I really have not idea but it seems to me that it's not.
Personally I'm keeping my eyes on the Alpha and the PowerPC. Out of curiosity I tried out one of the prerelease PowerPC linux distros on an old 7200 mac on it's way to the bone yard and was almost disappointed. It was pretty much just like sitting at a redhat box (accept slower - times have changed a bit since that 7200).
I think that if Compaq works with the Linux community a bit with regards to compilers and the like they could have an excellent future. I'd love to have an alpha to beat up on my code and warm my feet
Anyway even if 2nd generation Intel/HP cpu is the roadmap for all hardware (it sounds good but Compaq and IBM/Motorola are not sitting on their hands) how much money do you think compaq could make before that sees the light of day?
And how much is that thing going to cost? Will I be able to get an Alpha for 1/2 as much by that time?
Actually, I believe the first dissenter was confused by my language. I don't work on internal servers. I work in an engineering group. "Compaq does have customer support for Linux on x86" is what I should've said.
âoeIn theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not." â Albert Einstein
My take on Dell selling Linux is that Bill Gates most likely talked with Mike Dell and said his lawyers need a big OEM showing that they are selling non-MSFT OS's. In comes Dell and look, you have to pay extra for the Linux machine. A MSFT mouse you say? I'm not surprised that MSFT mice are your only choice because MSFT wants their name on that box somehow. I say that Dell will drop Linux when the DOJ vs MSFT case is finished. Really now, Bill and Mike are buddies and Mike stands up for Bill at any chance he gets. I'd expect Linux on desktops from Gateway, Compaq and IBM way before Dell. So Dell is a lion in sheeps clothing if you ask me.
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
you're wrong.. there's lot's of stuff on linux within .dec.com. i admin one of them.
the big stuff isn't, i agree, not yet anyway.
As a company gets bigger, it has more resources with which to develop products, but as explained in _The Mythical Man-Month_ you cannot put ten times as many engineers to work on a product and expect it to get done in 1/10th of the time. It is often more profitable, in terms of getting more products to the market faster, to have your engineering department divided into teams which each work on something different, requiring little (or no) communication between them. It's a little like cluster processing that way -- the more independent the tasks, the more linearly your workforce scales. This does not reduce the time it takes to get an individual product to market, but it does get them to market in a reasonable time, and increases the number of products "in the pipe" at any given time.
I posit that Compaq's development of Linux solutions in addition to Tru64 solutions be seen in this light. There are tasks which really need a VMS or Tru64 system, but there are insufficient applications for these platforms to make a well-rounded general-purpose engineering workstation. Linux, on the other hand, excels in the workstation arena. All of the applications an engineer needs in day-to-day operations is right there on the box, and since X11 is X11 the linux box can interface transparently with the Tru64's applications over the network.
Developing solutions for a proprietary Unix OS and for Linux is *not* a bad form of fragmentation. It is a sensible distribution of development resources which yields high returns.
-- Guges --
I work at Compaq too, and I can tell you that this poster does not know what he is talking about. There is serious corporate support for Linux on both x86 and Alpha. The poster may not work in the division where Linux activity is happening (such as DEC, Tandem, and enterprise computing).
These posts are pretty confused about graphics technology. Hardware accelerated graphics engines, like the SGI Onyx, cannot do the (software based) rendering tasks that films like Toy Story require. Most of Pixar's work is based on RenderMan which is an entirely different level of rendering sophistication than hardware accelerators currently provide. And in fact, the newest nVidia (NV10) 256 bit graphics accelerators are about as powerful today as an Onyx, but cost about 1/1000 as much. And in fact most of the designers were formerly SGI's Onyx designers! Shows the relentless advance of commodity ASIC technology.
I'm glad that someone is working on making Linux more accessible on other platforms. Lots of work has gone into x86 versions, with Sparc and Alpha progress still lacking. Maybe Sun will follow suit and perfect Linux for Sparc. That would be a good move for them. They could have Solaris run servers, and use Linux as a workstation OS.
Brad Johnson
Advisory Editor
Brad Johnson
Oh my god, compaq is going to use linux and they ARE going to make software for it, and then they ARE going to stop supporting software, and little did we know they put bugs in linux that would make it crash and everyone will get mad at linux and go to NT. DAMN COMPAQ for touching our presious(sp?) linux!! ITS OURS DON'T TRY TO MAKE IT BETTER!! AWAY foul demons of hell.. no one wants to help linux, everyone wants to undermind it... and dont' moderate me down damit! ITS A JOKE! :)
i'm laughing at the slashdot crowd.. not with them..
that bit about threads is wrong.
linux does support threads, and has since about 1.2. There was a recent discussion about it on linux-kernel. What i understood from it was that threads and processes are both created by the kernel's 'clone' call - which takes arguments to specify whether to share memory/stack/etc..
everything else uses that, in fact the traditional Unix process system creation calls are just C lib wrappers around linux clone(). Just as the thread library calls are.
So it seems linux supports threads pretty well, just the userspace library wasn't up to it until glibc.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
I don't want to jump to conclusions based on 3rd hand news, but linux on intel is "the" market. If Compaq truly only wants linux on alpha that is a huge mistake. Alpha regardless of performance advantage just won't be considered anymore in a few years once intel 2nd generation 64-bit cpu come out.
What is with you people and clustering?!!?!?!! Do any of you even remotle comprehend the concept. Apearantly not, since just about every article has a thread about beowolf. You're all on crack! Get a fuckin' life....
There are a couple of companies that seem to "get it" and a couple that don't. I'd (and, of course, at least 50% will disagree with me, but that's Slashdot) put SGI and IBM in the group of companies that "get it" and Sun and Compaq in the group that doesn't. The latter two are treating Linux as the little brother to the OS they produce. Linux will never be sold by Sun as a solution by itself. They'd rather it be the "helper OS" to Solaris. Same with Compaq. Tru64 and VMS are always going to be the main NOS's they want to sell. Linux? Oh, it's that "low end" operating system we support on our smaller machines.
At least SGI is contributing code to help Linux scale better, have a journalling file system, and be optimized for a UMA architecture. IBM seems to want Apache to be a good solution for everything and also seems to be more OS agnostic. It's too bad that Linux is in coopetition with Compaq and Sun because they could potentially be strong allies. As of yet, they are only half-hearted helpers. If either of them concentrated on making their platform the friendliest, most optimized platform for Linux, they would be in a strong position when all the optimization comes together to make Linux the strongest server OS bar none.
So they want to continue pushing SCO on the x86 market. Kinda funny that on some level they are actually competing with themselves, by pushing SCO in one hand and linux on the other.
As to alpha, I will be very surpised if it leaves anytime soon. The new chips are very fast and (last time I checked) still going to be faster than the initial offering of IA-64.
-- Moondog
Dell isn't "looking" to put Linux on desktops.. They already have. Unfortunately, due to their "Winmodem" policy, you can't get a desktop with a modem (if you prefer Ethernet, you likely don't care, especially if you live in a dorm). A quick skim through their site should back that up. (I'd post a direct link, but their site loads too slowly for my tastes)
Of course, I still think it's funny that they appear to offer Logitech mice, but in the custom config page for their Linux systems, you aren't given a choice. It's MS IntelliMouse or.. well.. MS IntelliMouse. Yay!
~ Kish
If I remember correctly Linus officially decreed that solaris threading model sucks. And Linux model is much cleaner. This ofcourse is debatable. But from the application programmers point of view (which I am not) you really do not care what kind of threading model your kernel implements as long as you have POSIX interface to it. Ville
I'm working at Compaq, hence the question...
Compaq DOES support Linux on x86. I work there and work on Linux problems on our servers.
âoeIn theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not." â Albert Einstein
They're all by ACs and they all read 'hey, [article topic] would be great for beowulf clusters.' Or something along those lines. Some poor sod is just getting his rocks off.
Isn't there a moderation tag like (Moron)?
- dom
- gnome
What's up, Mr Jones?
From now on on slashdot, if you do now talk about how cool "current technology" would be for a beowulf cluster you will me moderated down to "dumb"
I want my Itsy!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon