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HP Still Porting Linux to 64 bit PA RISC
Fungai wrote with an update to the on-going HP/Puffin Group story. There'd been some confusion with the recent purchase of Puffin Group by Linuxcare, but HP has confirmed that they will port Linux to their 64 bit PA-RISC chips. HP will still be partnering with Puffin Group to do it, with results expected in the first half of 2000.
Has anyone here used a RISC processor? I haven't, and I'm curious as to the performance level of these things running Linux....
What does this mean for the 700/800 series machines and the porting effort there? I myself own 2 700 series machines that I would like to have Linux running on. Now true I wouldnt mind buying a J7000 but I think economically isn't there going to be more likeliness of people buying older Nova class and the K,R,D, and B series?
MaShaun Jones
The more the merrier. So now we have the Mer^H^H^HItanium, now the HP processor...
/. was down (or /.ed). Rob, could you please inform us of possible downtimes before hand. Not all of us have free local calls. :(
Well, best of luck geeks. Heres hoping that Linux will run on another platform soon.
On an offtopic note: I tried posting this story earlier, but
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
And the 2038 problem too?
Are there other interesting things that get cleaned up, or turn out to be gotchas?
Apple Macintosh
- Yellow Dog Linux
- MkLinux
- LinuxPPC
SGI--Ivan, weenie NT4 user: bite me!
--weenie NT4 user: bite me!
"Computers are nothing but a perfect illusion of order" -- Iggy Pop
As for class N machines a recent one will have at least 2 processor (what we have is 2 class N with 4 processors each and a shared Raid Array)... These machine are physically huge, they are extremely fast and extremely expensive. They have much better performance than you can have with any x86-based computer right now. They don't have a great price/performance ratio, but sometime you need the performance they deliver...
HP needs to generate some sort of buzz for PA-RISC - Merced is late and Sun and IBM are stealing the unix market from them.
This is a good thing for Linux, but a better one for HP. Just when you thought they'd put all their eggs in the IA64 basket... Out pops Linux on 64-bit PA RISC and a nice new hardware revenue stream for HP.
The-cynical-but-fond-of-risk-Linux-userI think (the eternal IMHO) that the major advantage that a PA-RISC port presents is not blinding speed on the desktop or price-performance, but access to a family of mission-critical hardware. Linux, developed on PC's and ported to a wide range of workstation hardware, has historically been short on big iron. Access to PA-RISC hardware, whether legacy or new machines, will go a long way towards remedying that deficit.
If people (myself among them) spoke out against linux's reliability on commodity hardware, no one can question the reliability and stability of HP's unix hardware. It would be easy to sell me on a HP unix box running Linux - or at least, it would be, if I was still doing that kind of stuff.
--
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There is no premature anti-fascism. -Ernest Hemingway
Why can't linux people just accept that their OS' niche is a unix-like OS running on commodity hardware? We've seen another good example of an OS that tries to be all things, and look how it failed. Do we really want to take the industry down that path again? Linux works exceptionally well on the hardware it was designed for: namely, x86 hardware. It runs on macintoshes, HP machines, Alphas, and god only knows what else... but those are all inferior ports.
Code sharing is good. Code bloat is not. My vote is to fork the existing ports into seperate kernel dev teams and refocus linux. If we spread ourselves too thin, we'll release about as often as Microsoft. *stepping down off the soap box* Mark me down now.
And Alpha's have been running Linux almost from
day one.
HP should spend some of that money on alpha instead.
just check out this site.
www.dcginc.com
They have a 700Mhz Alpha 21264 system using the
AMD Irongate chipset for just $5000.
700Mhz EV6 system
Or screaming Dual 750Mhz Alpha 21264 system with
all the frills for just $15000
mind you thats with 8MB of cache per processor.
DUAL 750 Mhz Alpha 21264 System with 16MBytes of cache
looking up the spec site we see that a 700Mhz EV6 gets 39.1 specINT and 68.1 specFP.
scaling that these 750Mhz 21264's should have
42 specINT and 72 specFP
On a side note does HP think IA64 will not
be as hot as once predicted.
why are they now pushing linux for PA Risk.
if they are going to abandon PA Risk in a year or two
why start now to port linux?
Or is HP going to pull an SGI
Oops. PA Risk=PA-RISC.
It's not a glibc issue as much as a Unix issue. Unix systems count time with the assumption that 1970 was the beginning of time. The count is stored in a datatype known as "time_t". On 32-bit systems, this value will overflow around 2038.
64-bit systems will allow time_t to be defined to a larger datatype and will allow for exponentially larger values.
Will the port run on HP3000/MPEiX boxes as well?
Your Working Boy,
mkLinux (a version of Linux based on a Mach kernel) is really only used by people with Nubus-based PowerMacs. These were only sold in the 1994-96 time period.
Modern PCI Macs run the normal Linux kernel. For Mach fans, Apple is distributing the beginnings of an OS based on Mach and BSD called "Darwin".
I don't know how much HP has paid to Puffin-and-friends to port the kernel (though I bet equipment makes up a big chunk of the total). A few million dollars, at most.
Now consider all the customers who've spent billions over the years to run their businesses with HP equipment. With the great and growing value of open source, why on earth would you deny them access? How rude!
This is reason IBM whipped up a custom kernel for their mainframe customers. Negligible cost for ever increasing benefits.
disclaimer: I've only worked on IA-32, but I saw an HP server cube once (HP9000 IIRC).
I'm cool like a fool in a swimming p-p-pfft-pool
All other RISC CPUs (MIPS, USPARC, and esp. Power(PC),...) have fallen behind the Alpha and PA-RISC, and if I had to chose one of the two for my desktop, I think I would chose the PA-RISC. Sure, the Alpha 21264 is a little faster, but the overall Quality of the HP hardware is hard to beat.
We have some really old PA-RISC Workstations (~1990) and they are still in best condition and fun to work with. These machines are astonishingly fast for their time. An ancient PA-RISC 7100 is as fast (INT) as a PPro at half the clock speed, and competes with a P2/400 at FP - running at a 5th of the clock speed!
P.S.: Don't be fooled by the PowerPC and Apples stupid "supercomputer" campaign. Even the G4 is horribly slooowwww for a RISC CPU, even in FP. A fast CISC Athlon still beats it any day of the week. And x86 have broken the GFLOP barrier almost a year before Apple with their G4. If you want a real computer, don't go for Apple toys.
Do you actually plan on using your current computer until the year 2038? Don't worry about it.
I bet you can really watch those DVD movies.
Beeoooch? What the hell is that?
Oh, I get it. Object-oriented methodology wrestling.
Let's get ready to RUMMMMMMM-BAUGH!
:-)
Well, it assumes there can be 62 secs in a minute which is not true. Well, sh** happens ;-) AC