Please remember the GPL encumbrances only come into play when you redistribute the code. If you use GPL software for in-house work, there are no restrictions as to what can be done with it. This is the most overlooked aspect of the GPL- it doesn't limit your use in any way at all until you redistribute it.
Tungsten moved down a bit after the Nov list, now at #10. We still use linux though, and it's a stock version of Redhat Enterprise Linux at that. We also use SuSE Linux Enterprise Server on our Mercury cluster, which comes in at #22 on the top500 list. That's linux running on a 1250+ node cluster and a 880+ node cluster.
Nope, no scalibility here. Actually, the scientist running the top500 projects has claimed (with some caveats) that by his count, 301 machines of the current top 500 run linux. Linux Rules Supercomputers
Missed the point. One of the major issues here is the concept of "secret laws". Whether or not showing an ID is an effective deterent to terroism is not the biggest issue here- what's disturbing is the concept that the goverenment (local, state or federal) believes that it might have the power to create laws secretly or to use secret laws as the basis for enforcement.
You may perhaps have heard the old saw that "ignorance of the law is no excuse", a concept which implies that it is the duty of all citizens to know all the laws, or at least, understand what kind of behavior is in violation. You would find it hard to plead with a judge that you didn't know that it was illegal to steal a car or beat somebody up, just because you didn't read the laws prohibiting such actions.
Secret laws remove any possibility of knowing what is illegal, and will lead to a situation where every citizen can be charged for criminal acts, if the authorities find it convenient to do so. This is known as a "police state", examples of which can be found in Communist Russia, and the military juntas of the 70's in South America. This is what is the really big deal- the possibility that members of the government may have you arrested for breaking laws of which you know nothing. Let's not get into the possibilty that they might enforce laws which don't exist. We all know that our government's belief in the habeas corpus is shaky and we're already talking about just how hard it is to challenge "secret laws" which might exist, as that's the gist of the report to which this article refers.
This is fundamental change in the balance of power in the government, and potentially, a fundamental change in the form of our government. I am very glad that there are some citizens and organizations which realize this and are fighting to prevent such changes. I submit to you that showing an ID to board an airplane is exactly, exactly, the state of affairs that we were warned against by Benjamin Franklin when said "Those who would trade liberty for security, deserve neither."
If you believe that concerns about abuse of power are strawmen arguements, let me provide a few links for your perusal: Air Marshall Abuse and Public Indigity . These are the tip of the iceberg, as these events are not directed with purpose or malice, but a simple outgrowth of conditions. I have no wish to experience the horror the Argentinian people did when they were subject to secret laws.
In the amendment to the sale, they authorized the transfer of such copyrights as SCO needed 'in the pursuit of SCO's UNIX resale business'. As SCO was paying 90% of their sales to Novell per the agreement to act as a reseller of Unix, SCO really didn't need copyrights to all of Unix, just the copyrights on the Unix documentation for the products that they were reselling.
Moverover, authorizing the transfer of any copyrights is a far cry from actually doing so, which is why SCO can't produce the transfer bill. As the courts have ruled on many occasions, you actually need a specific Transfer of Copyright, which specifies exactly what was transferred, or it doesn't count.
That's not to say that SCO couldn't try convince a court that the agreement and amendments are such that Novell is in breech of contract, and that Novell should be forced to hand over the copyrights now. Unfortunately for SCO, that wouldn't help them in this case, as they need to show that Novell KNEW that it didn't own the copyrights to show malice. Obviously, that isn't the case, now is it?
Here's the link to the orignal HardOCP article
detailing their investigation.
Link to Original HardOCP article
This looks a good piece of investigative journalism by a website. Kudos to them for providing the public an unbiased set of facts.
No reason why a driver couldn't or won't be written that enables ext3/reiserfs. The specs for both the filesystem and EFI are open. NTFS I don't know about, and doesn't matter to me as I won't use it. Just more Microsoftian lock-in.:)
No, it doesn't require a fat32 partition to boot. I can boot any node I have into a remote install or a ramdisk based shell if I want. No harddrive required.
BIOS is ok for a home system, but its not much use for a cluster or a server. EFI gives you more options as to how to boot the system and more ability to troubleshoot if the disk is bad.
As a user of EFI on a linux cluster, I can tell you specifically that a partition is not required for operation. It's an option, to let the user include extra useful utilities.
On our Intel Tiger 4 nodes, we have the/boot partition formated fat32 as we boot from local disk, but we do remote installs completely off a netboot as well.
If you run ia64 (all 5 of us:) ) you already run EFI. For some of you out there who may not have actually seen EFI in action, I'd thought I provide some small examples of what it looks like.
EFI does a running check of the hardware that it understands, drivers for which were provided by the Motherboard maker.
Here's a snapshot of the EFI SCAN on my INTEL Tiger4 system.:
EFI version 1.10 [14.61] Build flags: EFI64 Running on Intel(R) Itanium(R) 2 processor EFI_DEBUG EFI IA-64 SDV/FDK (BIOS CallBacks) [Wed Jan 1 23:33:30 2003] - INTEL Cache Enabled. This image MainEntry is at address 000000007FA02000 Searching for EFI 1.1 SCSI driver.... Scsi(Pun0,Lun0) MAXTOR ATLASU320_18_SCAB120 (320 MBytes/sec) Scsi(Pun1,Lun0) MAXTOR ATLASU320_73_SCAB120 (320 MBytes/sec) Scsi(Pun2,Lun0) MAXTOR ATLASU320_73_SCAB120 (320 MBytes/sec) Scsi(Pun6,Lun0) ESG-SHV Invoking PxeDhcp4 protocol to obtain IP address.
At the end of this, I get a menu that I can manually select from (cursor up and down), or let it automatically try the options(which can be modified to suit the user's needs). Here's a snapsnot:
EFI Boot Manager ver 1.10 [14.61]
Please select a boot option
Network Boot/Pci(1|0|0)/Mac(0007E9D8147A)
Linux
Floppy/Pci(1F|1)/Ata(Primary,Slave)
CD/DVD ROM/Pci(1F|1)/Ata(Primary,Master)
EFI Shell [Built-in]
Boot option maintenance menu
Use ^ and v to change option(s). Use Enter to select an option
As you can see, EFI has detected the network card, a bootable linux partition, the floppy (LS240 in this case), and the cdrom drive. Anything you can detect, you can boot off from.
The EFI shell option brings you into a shell. Once in the shell, you can easily switch to another filesystem by executing a changefilesystem command, similar to msdos:
fs1:
The shell prompt (for filesystem 0, which is the first filesystem EFI finds, whether its on a floppy, a cdrom, a harddrive, usb key, whatever)
fs0:\>
The shell looks like a dos shell, but runs commands that the motherboard manufacturer includes, such as "edit" "ls" "cat" "cp" "mount" and others. These commands live in ROM.
EFI understands the FAT32 filesystem and can perform operations on files living there including editing. EFI can access any FAT32 on any device EFI has a built-in driver for, and any device that the user can obtain an EFI driver for.
Another nice feature is that you can create a partition on the disk that efi will use to hold more commands, or updated commands, or drivers for newer hardware. These extra commands when then be available to you at boot time.
To the user, EFI looks almost like an built-in mini OS that understands enough of the hardware to give you several boot options, as well as the ability to manipulate files on the devices it sees.
I've seen no evidence of DRM support, or OS lock-in, but that certainly doesn't rule out the possibility. The thing is, EFI is enough of a standard that the user might have the possibility of replacing the stock EFI with some other version to meet their personal needs. This would certainly put us ahead of where we are with current vendor lockin on motherboard bios.
Reading carefully through the presentation.pdf that covers what information they give out, I see that they have no external disks or SAN. The specs state that they have 160GB of serial ATA per machine, probably in 1 drive.
There was no mention of network bandwidth external to the cluster.
It's possible, but I do have to ask some questions- how much storage did the VT guys get with it? Our Tungsten machine has access to over a 100 TeraBytes of SAN that was delivered with the cluster. I've not been able to see anywhere how much storage the Big Mac came with.
Whoops, you got it wrong, Neo's purpose is to screw humanity, at least as it is defined by the machine.
1) The machine is using him to refine their model of civilization, so that that they can better control humanity.
2) His choice will either destroy all of humanity or just most of it.
Sco is using it's collection of lawyers to do the same thing to free software. This is an apt comparison.
Good thing we have a third movie coming out that solves these dilemas.
That may be true. SuSE's YAST is copyrighted and
not freely distributable.
Fortunately for rest of us, I don't need to run the installer to copy the the software, and the GPL explicitly does grant the end user the right to copy and run the software. Given that I can copy the software, I can use this on as many machines as I desire.
I understand that this is not the intent of the agreement that RH is trying to use, but the intent
of the GPL is clear, and the GPL takes precedence over RH's license.
These clusters are not beowulf; they allow access through a general scheduler and have MPI to run programs that use a group of nodes at once. This gives the greatest flexability to the users to create a computational system that can be optimzed for the size and needs of their problem. The size of a cluster that can be supported at a national center allows enough computational power to solve problems that can't be solved elsewhere. Given that a cluster of a 128 nodes is now considered an instituitional asset and within the purchasing power of any university, it makes sense to use federal funds to create systems to handle problems beyond the scale of a cluster that any university might own.
Another aspect of this issue arises in the asumption that cluster computing is so easily accomplished that it might be compared to the setup of a single system. I respectfully submit that the simpliest of clusters is none too easy to deploy and use as of today, not to mention the lack of support one gets for the application of their scientific research to a stock parallel computing platform. The national centers can afford to have consultants and researchers on staff that specialize in these matters, as well as full-time admins.
Note: The opinions expressed here are my own and not necessarily representative of my employer or the federal government. In addition, given that I am employed by NCSA, a slight element of bias may be present in my statements.:)
GPFS? are you nuts? Only an anonymous coward would claim that "GPFS works great on Linux clusters!"
Is this Lyle, from the gpfs development team?
GPFS requires:
1) specific OS version
2) specific kernel version
3) 4 300page manuals to setup
4) doesn't shutdown cleanly
5) doesn't bring a computer back into the nodeset easily
6) Did he mention the load of 4 that top & uptime report? (don't even think about running iozone on this puppy
7) how about the two daemons that must be in/etc/inittab so they always respawn?
8) who knows what licensing requirements
GPFS provides:
1) one common mount
2) fs size up to 9 TB
3) failover, if you have a SAN
This is SO not for a home user or small office, it's not funny. Consider running this if you have a cluster in the top 100 of the top500.org list, maybe. We have 2 clusters on the list and GPFS deployed on one of them, so we have personal experience with this.
Use SAMBA if you have windows boxes in the mix, nfs otherwise.
Is it possible to assume that the WordML format is trademarked, patented and otherwise unusable for those of us not willing to pay a microsoft tax?
Microsoft's opinion of standards is well known. Support for standards outside of microsoft is non-existant. An equally obvious question is why should the OpenOffice people support Microsoft's propriety crap?
As to "...who cares about forcing everyone to use one specific format", why, that would be microsoft, obviously.
I do hope the lack of support for Windows98 users will come back to haunt to MS. It's not nice to abandon your own customers, especially by forcing them to choose between unnecessary upgrades and the competition.
Apps for which performance really matters and are most likely to be deployed are games. And no, they will not be recompiled for any new architechture The entire point of x86-64 is that it will run current apps faster, and provide upgrade paths.
Let's get this straight, people. EFI lives in a flash ram device on the mainboard. You can boot the node without a single harddrive in it.
EFI does allow you to format a partition of the hard drive in vfat (linuxspeak for fat32) so that it can recognize the files stored on it. Those files can be anything you want, and the partition may be mounted by the OS and treated as a regular partition. For example, the/boot partition of a Itanium II node that has SuSe SLES 8.1 installed on it looks like this:
drwxr--r-- 3 root root 4096 Dec 31 1969.
drwxr-xr-x 23 root root 528 Feb 11 11:26..
-rwxr--r-- 1 root root 503248 Jan 27 06:55 System.map-2.4.19-SMP
drwxr--r-- 4 root root 4096 Jan 27 07:51 efi
-rwxr--r-- 1 root root 1160383 Feb 10 21:00 initrd
-rwxr--r-- 1 root root 1156850 Feb 10 21:00 initrd.shipped
-rwxr--r-- 1 root root 2381696 Jan 27 12:55 vmlinuz
-rwxr--r-- 1 root root 72173 Jan 27 14:37 vmlinuz.autoconf.h
-rwxr--r-- 1 root root 39332 Jan 27 14:37 vmlinuz.config
-rwxr--r-- 1 root root 2381696 Feb 10 19:12 vmlinuz.shipped
-rwxr--r-- 1 root root 130 Jan 27 12:33 vmlinuz.version.h
When EFI boots up, it will look for fat32 or fat16(why bother?) partitions on any harddrives, cdroms, ls240's or any other local devices the MB manufacturer supports. It then offers you the opportunity to access these mounts just like you had good old dos onboard. Instead of assigning drive letters, you get FS0:, FS1:, etc.
Caveats:
The OEM who provides the MB and its EFI implementation has to provide the driver for the devices that EFI supports. So the manufacturer of an Intel Tiger 4 Chassis with built-in SCSI from MPT needs to obtain the EFI driver for the device from the manufacturer. Same thing for the IDE chips on board or the integrated NIC. If the EFI has the built-in driver in the rom, it can then use that device during boot. I don't know if a hardware driver for EFI can be loaded manually.
To live on the harddrive, EFI uses a new type of partition table, EFI GPT, to store partition information. fdisk doesn't like this, but parted works just fine for linux. I'm not sure how Windows deals with this.
Hope this helps. If you need to know how I know this, well let's just say that I have over 256 Tiger 4's in my linux cluster.:)
EFI understands vfat, so the "reserved space" is just a partition. It can be of any size. It can be mounted by the OS, say SuSe or RedHat ia64 and treated as any other partition.
One thing that might not be clear is that EFI doens't "live" on the hard drive- it can store more utilities there, but on boot, you have to choose to go to harddrive in preference to to a network or cdrom boot.
You need to read the entire article. The example is used to show why tokening the entire word rather than looking at just the root is important.
His filtering technique are such that he generated only 5 false positive in 5 months, 4 of which were only filtered because they had similar characteristics to actual spam, and therefore, not a catastrophic loss.
And you blame RedHat for the failure of Promise or Adaptec to release open source in what way?
RedHat doesn't pay these clowns to write binary-only modules; they do it themselves, and they choose to write for the OS's that have the most market share.
If you don't like this behavior, don't buy that hardware! In addition, let them know why you're not buying and tell them whose stuff you are getting.
Blaming RedHat for the sins of others is not a rational thing to do.
Nyahh, Patrick Warburton. The Tick is over, so he's free. He has practice in a rubber suit. He's got the chin, plus the height, plus the bulk.
Now, for an interesting Batman, think... Jack Nicholson. No, not the one who died as the Joker, but the one who played in Wolf. He'd have the intensity and age for a Dark Knight.
This assumes that the movie would play in a serious tone...
I remember reading a short explanation from you describing the differences between CPM and DOS in one of your novels many years ago, so it does surprise me that you might adopt a word processor based on its merits, rather than its advertising. Given your long experience and reliance on word processing to meet the demands of publishing so many novels, I think you would have some opinions on features and pitfalls of various word processing software. Could you give us the benefit of your experience on this?
I've seen notice in one of your Xanth books that work may be in progress on "The Iron Maiden." I hope it is.:)
Thanks for spending some of your time to satisfy our curiosity.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm, that plugin did the trick for me. What Firefox version are you on? I just installed 1.0.2
Please remember the GPL encumbrances only come into play when you redistribute the code. If you use GPL software for in-house work, there are no restrictions as to what can be done with it. This is the most overlooked aspect of the GPL- it doesn't limit your use in any way at all until you redistribute it.
Nope, no scalibility here. Actually, the scientist running the top500 projects has claimed (with some caveats) that by his count, 301 machines of the current top 500 run linux. Linux Rules Supercomputers
You may perhaps have heard the old saw that "ignorance of the law is no excuse", a concept which implies that it is the duty of all citizens to know all the laws, or at least, understand what kind of behavior is in violation. You would find it hard to plead with a judge that you didn't know that it was illegal to steal a car or beat somebody up, just because you didn't read the laws prohibiting such actions.
Secret laws remove any possibility of knowing what is illegal, and will lead to a situation where every citizen can be charged for criminal acts, if the authorities find it convenient to do so. This is known as a "police state", examples of which can be found in Communist Russia, and the military juntas of the 70's in South America. This is what is the really big deal- the possibility that members of the government may have you arrested for breaking laws of which you know nothing. Let's not get into the possibilty that they might enforce laws which don't exist. We all know that our government's belief in the habeas corpus is shaky and we're already talking about just how hard it is to challenge "secret laws" which might exist, as that's the gist of the report to which this article refers.
This is fundamental change in the balance of power in the government, and potentially, a fundamental change in the form of our government. I am very glad that there are some citizens and organizations which realize this and are fighting to prevent such changes. I submit to you that showing an ID to board an airplane is exactly, exactly, the state of affairs that we were warned against by Benjamin Franklin when said "Those who would trade liberty for security, deserve neither."
If you believe that concerns about abuse of power are strawmen arguements, let me provide a few links for your perusal: Air Marshall Abuse and Public Indigity . These are the tip of the iceberg, as these events are not directed with purpose or malice, but a simple outgrowth of conditions. I have no wish to experience the horror the Argentinian people did when they were subject to secret laws.
Moverover, authorizing the transfer of any copyrights is a far cry from actually doing so, which is why SCO can't produce the transfer bill. As the courts have ruled on many occasions, you actually need a specific Transfer of Copyright, which specifies exactly what was transferred, or it doesn't count.
That's not to say that SCO couldn't try convince a court that the agreement and amendments are such that Novell is in breech of contract, and that Novell should be forced to hand over the copyrights now. Unfortunately for SCO, that wouldn't help them in this case, as they need to show that Novell KNEW that it didn't own the copyrights to show malice. Obviously, that isn't the case, now is it?
Didn't see any "observers" from either party there. Still using punch card ballots, so no "Pre-stuffed" machines here.
Here's the link to the orignal HardOCP article detailing their investigation.
Link to Original HardOCP article
This looks a good piece of investigative journalism by a website. Kudos to them for providing the public an unbiased set of facts.
No reason why a driver couldn't or won't be written that enables ext3/reiserfs. The specs for both the filesystem and EFI are open. NTFS I don't know about, and doesn't matter to me as I won't use it. Just more Microsoftian lock-in. :)
No, it doesn't require a fat32 partition to boot.
I can boot any node I have into a remote install or a ramdisk based shell if I want. No harddrive required.
BIOS is ok for a home system, but its not much use for a cluster or a server. EFI gives you more options as to how to boot the system and more ability to troubleshoot if the disk is bad.
As a user of EFI on a linux cluster, I can tell you specifically that a partition is not required for operation. It's an option, to let the user include extra useful utilities.
/boot partition formated fat32 as we boot from local disk, but we do remote installs completely off a netboot as well.
On our Intel Tiger 4 nodes, we have the
If you run ia64 (all 5 of us :) ) you already run EFI. For some of you out there who may not have actually seen EFI in action, I'd thought I provide some small examples of what it looks like.
EFI does a running check of the hardware that it understands, drivers for which were provided by the Motherboard maker.
Here's a snapshot of the EFI SCAN on my INTEL Tiger4 system.:
EFI version 1.10 [14.61] Build flags: EFI64 Running on Intel(R) Itanium(R) 2 processor EFI_DEBUG
EFI IA-64 SDV/FDK (BIOS CallBacks) [Wed Jan 1 23:33:30 2003] - INTEL
Cache Enabled. This image MainEntry is at address 000000007FA02000
Searching for EFI 1.1 SCSI driver....
Scsi(Pun0,Lun0) MAXTOR ATLASU320_18_SCAB120 (320 MBytes/sec)
Scsi(Pun1,Lun0) MAXTOR ATLASU320_73_SCAB120 (320 MBytes/sec)
Scsi(Pun2,Lun0) MAXTOR ATLASU320_73_SCAB120 (320 MBytes/sec)
Scsi(Pun6,Lun0) ESG-SHV
Invoking PxeDhcp4 protocol to obtain IP address.
At the end of this, I get a menu that I can manually select from (cursor up and down), or let it automatically try the options(which can be modified to suit the user's needs). Here's a snapsnot:
EFI Boot Manager ver 1.10 [14.61]
Please select a boot option
Network Boot/Pci(1|0|0)/Mac(0007E9D8147A)
Linux
Floppy/Pci(1F|1)/Ata(Primary,Slave)
CD/DVD ROM/Pci(1F|1)/Ata(Primary,Master)
EFI Shell [Built-in]
Boot option maintenance menu
Use ^ and v to change option(s). Use Enter to select an option
As you can see, EFI has detected the network card, a bootable linux partition, the floppy (LS240 in this case), and the cdrom drive. Anything you can detect, you can boot off from.
The EFI shell option brings you into a shell. Once in the shell, you can easily switch to another filesystem by executing a changefilesystem command, similar to msdos:
fs1:
The shell prompt (for filesystem 0, which is the first filesystem EFI finds, whether its on a floppy, a cdrom, a harddrive, usb key, whatever)
fs0:\>
The shell looks like a dos shell, but runs commands that the motherboard manufacturer includes, such as "edit" "ls" "cat" "cp" "mount" and others. These commands live in ROM.
EFI understands the FAT32 filesystem and can perform operations on files living there including editing. EFI can access any FAT32 on any device EFI has a built-in driver for, and any device that the user can obtain an EFI driver for.
Another nice feature is that you can create a partition on the disk that efi will use to hold more commands, or updated commands, or drivers for newer hardware. These extra commands when then be available to you at boot time.
To the user, EFI looks almost like an built-in mini OS that understands enough of the hardware to give you several boot options, as well as the ability to manipulate files on the devices it sees.
I've seen no evidence of DRM support, or OS lock-in, but that certainly doesn't rule out the possibility. The thing is, EFI is enough of a standard that the user might have the possibility of replacing the stock EFI with some other version to meet their personal needs. This would certainly put us ahead of where we are with current vendor lockin on motherboard bios.
There was no mention of network bandwidth external to the cluster.
Perhaps they used this, he said with a grin: Mac Raid Storage Solution
The other question I have is how much of network pipe do they have to the outside world? Tungsten has a 40Gb connection to the Internet.
The focus of these questions being- if you can't get your data onto and out of the cluster, what use are all those teraflops?
Big Mac does prove a valid point, but it's purchase smacks more of a stunt than a real attempt to provide users with a useful computing environment.
1) The machine is using him to refine their model of civilization, so that that they can better control humanity.
2) His choice will either destroy all of humanity or just most of it.
Sco is using it's collection of lawyers to do the same thing to free software. This is an apt comparison.
Good thing we have a third movie coming out that solves these dilemas.
Fortunately for rest of us, I don't need to run the installer to copy the the software, and the GPL explicitly does grant the end user the right to copy and run the software. Given that I can copy the software, I can use this on as many machines as I desire.
I understand that this is not the intent of the agreement that RH is trying to use, but the intent of the GPL is clear, and the GPL takes precedence over RH's license.
The Titan Cluster
The Platinum Cluster
TeraGrid Clusters Successfully Installed at NCSA
These clusters run either RedHat or SuSE Linux and are available for researchers nationwide.
These clusters are not beowulf; they allow access through a general scheduler and have MPI to run programs that use a group of nodes at once. This gives the greatest flexability to the users to create a computational system that can be optimzed for the size and needs of their problem. The size of a cluster that can be supported at a national center allows enough computational power to solve problems that can't be solved elsewhere. Given that a cluster of a 128 nodes is now considered an instituitional asset and within the purchasing power of any university, it makes sense to use federal funds to create systems to handle problems beyond the scale of a cluster that any university might own.
Another aspect of this issue arises in the asumption that cluster computing is so easily accomplished that it might be compared to the setup of a single system. I respectfully submit that the simpliest of clusters is none too easy to deploy and use as of today, not to mention the lack of support one gets for the application of their scientific research to a stock parallel computing platform. The national centers can afford to have consultants and researchers on staff that specialize in these matters, as well as full-time admins.
Note: The opinions expressed here are my own and not necessarily representative of my employer or the federal government. In addition, given that I am employed by NCSA, a slight element of bias may be present in my statements. :)
GPFS? are you nuts? Only an anonymous coward would claim that "GPFS works great on Linux clusters!" Is this Lyle, from the gpfs development team?
/etc/inittab so they always respawn?
GPFS requires:
1) specific OS version
2) specific kernel version
3) 4 300page manuals to setup
4) doesn't shutdown cleanly
5) doesn't bring a computer back into the nodeset easily
6) Did he mention the load of 4 that top & uptime report? (don't even think about running iozone on this puppy
7) how about the two daemons that must be in
8) who knows what licensing requirements
GPFS provides:
1) one common mount
2) fs size up to 9 TB
3) failover, if you have a SAN
This is SO not for a home user or small office, it's not funny. Consider running this if you have a cluster in the top 100 of the top500.org list, maybe. We have 2 clusters on the list and GPFS deployed on one of them, so we have personal experience with this.
Use SAMBA if you have windows boxes in the mix, nfs otherwise.
Microsoft's opinion of standards is well known. Support for standards outside of microsoft is non-existant. An equally obvious question is why should the OpenOffice people support Microsoft's propriety crap? As to "...who cares about forcing everyone to use one specific format", why, that would be microsoft, obviously.
I do hope the lack of support for Windows98 users will come back to haunt to MS. It's not nice to abandon your own customers, especially by forcing them to choose between unnecessary upgrades and the competition.
Apps for which performance really matters and are most likely to be deployed are games. And no, they will not be recompiled for any new architechture The entire point of x86-64 is that it will run current apps faster, and provide upgrade paths.
EFI does allow you to format a partition of the hard drive in vfat (linuxspeak for fat32) so that it can recognize the files stored on it. Those files can be anything you want, and the partition may be mounted by the OS and treated as a regular partition. For example, the /boot partition of a Itanium II node that has SuSe SLES 8.1 installed on it looks like this:
drwxr--r-- 3 root root 4096 Dec 31 1969 . ..
drwxr-xr-x 23 root root 528 Feb 11 11:26
-rwxr--r-- 1 root root 503248 Jan 27 06:55 System.map-2.4.19-SMP
drwxr--r-- 4 root root 4096 Jan 27 07:51 efi
-rwxr--r-- 1 root root 1160383 Feb 10 21:00 initrd
-rwxr--r-- 1 root root 1156850 Feb 10 21:00 initrd.shipped
-rwxr--r-- 1 root root 2381696 Jan 27 12:55 vmlinuz
-rwxr--r-- 1 root root 72173 Jan 27 14:37 vmlinuz.autoconf.h
-rwxr--r-- 1 root root 39332 Jan 27 14:37 vmlinuz.config
-rwxr--r-- 1 root root 2381696 Feb 10 19:12 vmlinuz.shipped
-rwxr--r-- 1 root root 130 Jan 27 12:33 vmlinuz.version.h
When EFI boots up, it will look for fat32 or fat16(why bother?) partitions on any harddrives, cdroms, ls240's or any other local devices the MB manufacturer supports. It then offers you the opportunity to access these mounts just like you had good old dos onboard. Instead of assigning drive letters, you get FS0:, FS1:, etc.
Caveats:
The OEM who provides the MB and its EFI implementation has to provide the driver for the devices that EFI supports. So the manufacturer of an Intel Tiger 4 Chassis with built-in SCSI from MPT needs to obtain the EFI driver for the device from the manufacturer. Same thing for the IDE chips on board or the integrated NIC. If the EFI has the built-in driver in the rom, it can then use that device during boot. I don't know if a hardware driver for EFI can be loaded manually.
To live on the harddrive, EFI uses a new type of partition table, EFI GPT, to store partition information. fdisk doesn't like this, but parted works just fine for linux. I'm not sure how Windows deals with this.
Hope this helps. If you need to know how I know this, well let's just say that I have over 256 Tiger 4's in my linux cluster. :)
EFI understands vfat, so the "reserved space" is just a partition. It can be of any size. It can be mounted by the OS, say SuSe or RedHat ia64 and treated as any other partition. One thing that might not be clear is that EFI doens't "live" on the hard drive- it can store more utilities there, but on boot, you have to choose to go to harddrive in preference to to a network or cdrom boot.
His filtering technique are such that he generated only 5 false positive in 5 months, 4 of which were only filtered because they had similar characteristics to actual spam, and therefore, not a catastrophic loss.
RedHat doesn't pay these clowns to write binary-only modules; they do it themselves, and they choose to write for the OS's that have the most market share.
If you don't like this behavior, don't buy that hardware! In addition, let them know why you're not buying and tell them whose stuff you are getting.
Blaming RedHat for the sins of others is not a rational thing to do.
Now, for an interesting Batman, think...
Jack Nicholson.
No, not the one who died as the Joker, but the one who played in Wolf. He'd have the intensity and age for a Dark Knight.
This assumes that the movie would play in a serious tone...
I've seen notice in one of your Xanth books that work may be in progress on "The Iron Maiden." I hope it is. :)
Thanks for spending some of your time to satisfy our curiosity.