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:

• 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

In their role as a hardware vendor, they are officially "OS Agnostic", though.

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

That said, Alpha will be around as long as it's the quickest thing out there... which it probably will be for the foreseeable future.

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.

Comments

Re:good news!

[lar3ry]

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.
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Re:Solaris threads etc.

[Guy Harris]

The Linux threading model is not terribly clean, and there are still way too many huge locks in the current kernels.

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.

Linux had kernel threading retrofitted instead of woven into the OS like Solaris

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.)

SCO as an alternative to Linux

[dave_aiello]

For the last two years, I have been watching x86 hardware manufacturers and application software vendors to see what they would do with respect to the portion of their base that has (historically) run on SCO. This is what I have seen:

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.

good news!

[Mr. Penguin]

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

linux does have kernel threads

[Paul Jakma]

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.

Conflict of interest

[scumdamn]

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.

Re:Conflict of interest

[sbuckhopper]

Linux seems to fall under the same cometetition standards as the server market did for a while.

I remember a conference I went to 6 years ago called the SGI/Oracle Webmaster Survival Conference. In this conference, SGI made it well known that even though they would like to see one of their workstations on every desk top and one of there servers in everyone's server room, they knew that it wasn't possible. They knew that there would be a market split and that certain server/workstation solutions made sense in certain situations.

IBM seems to get this too. They portray that although we wouldn't really mind if you bought all this computing machinery from us, it isn't a big deal if you don't, especially if it doesn't make sense to do so. At a company I used to work for we would use IBM's high end printing solutions. Although we ran the printer with an RS/6000, we ran the rest of the network with Sun equipment. IBM would have liked to see us running the rest of the network (which was all *very* dependant upon this printer) with IBM equipment, but it wasn't necessary and they understood that the Sun/HP solution we had in place made more sense.

On the same respect, it seems as though Sun does not support this mentality. They think that every computer in your network should be a Sun computer. PC's? Forget it, replace them with XTerms. SGI's? Why do you need one of those when you could use an enterprise 10000 to do the same thing? Remember the movie Toy Story? They had to use (I forget the exact stats, but something like) 20 farms of 100 Sparc 20's to do the same thing that 2 or 3 SGI Onyx's could do. Sun doesn't seem to care if something doesn't make sense as long as it puts money in their pocket. Although I think that Sun has some great products, I think that this mentality will haunt them.

That also seems to be the same way that these companies approach Linux as mentioned before so I won't mention it again. You are right, and the evidence has been around longer than all of these companies have been embracing Linux. Articles like this are good indicators that Sun still believes that every computer in the world should and will be a Sun. Perhaps Sun is the one that needs the reality check in this article and not IBM.
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Actually..

[Kitsune Sushi]

I don't think they're looking at putting Linux on desktops at the moment (like Dell seems to be).

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!