[Beowulf] Rackable / SGI
Mark Hahn
hahn at mcmaster.ca
Fri Apr 3 15:11:43 PDT 2009
> involved with Linux, and open source things such as XFS we would not
> have the enterprise-level features that we see now.
unclear in several ways. for instance, linux has hotplug cpu
and memory support, but I really think this is dubious, since
there's damn little hardware that supports it, _anywhere_.
it's more of a "bank" feature rather than merely gold-plated
"enterprise".
XFS may have been fairly "enterprise" for its time - it's been
available for linux for quite a while, I think. but if you look
at options today, is it clearly the only "enterprise" choice?
certainly not - ext3 and 4 are certainly viable, though perhaps
not in every possible application. JFS is presumably also an
example of big-corp contributed "enterprise" software, but I'd
say has had even less of an effect. dare I mention advfs, which
has now been open-sourced?
from my position, XFS was a semi-fringe option for people who
distrusted ext3 for some reason. (and there were a few solid
ones, mainly just >8TB.) going forward, I expect to use ext4
and probably btrfs; I don't see a lasting impact of XFS.
if IBM did buy Sun and made an effort to get ZFS Linux-ized
(Linus-ized), it would be interesting. especially if they
also did so with Lustre.
> And enterprise
> level features need the hardware - it is no good some geek imagining
> what would happen on a 1024 processor 64 bit system as he compiles up
> the kernel pathches on his laptop.
cheap shot - don't you remember that linux was 64b quite early because
DEC dropped an alpha on Linus? it was also SMP-aware pretty early.
this is not to say that all the numa features existed at the time,
though they're all pretty obvious (node-aware memory management,
care taken with per-cpu features and layout, etc). I'm not denigrating
the big-iron contributions, but it's certainly not a "wise mature
enterprise gurus show pencil-necked linux punks how to do it right" ;)
regards, mark hahn.
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