What High End Unix Features are Missing from Linux? 1264
An anonymous reader asks: "Sun and other UNIX vendors are always claiming that Linux lacks features that their UNIX provides. I've seen many Slashdot readers claim the same thing. Can someone provide a list of these features and on what timeline they might be implemented in Linux?"
I Got One... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I Got One... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I Got One... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I Got One... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I Got One... (Score:5, Informative)
Honestly. Vendor Unix is usually tightly coupled to hardware. The advanced features often come out of this coupling, and are hardware specific. Linux does need a generic and abstract logical volume management system - the Sistina LVM is about the level of Solaris DiskSuite, minus GUI. IBM is implementing a superior and backwards compatible system: EVMS. If this makes it into 2.6, Linux will equal HP/UX and AIX here. There is also NUMA and ccNUMA work going on. This will kick a**.
The "dying" feature (Score:5, Funny)
Ein Zombie, Ein Undead, Ein BSD (Score:4, Funny)
Ein Zombie, Ein Undead, Ein BSD
Well of course (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously though, feasibly any Unix feature could be added to Linux, it just takes time and man power.
Re:Well of course (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Well of course (Score:5, Insightful)
The FSF has for some unfathomable reason decided
that man pages are obsolete and so man pages for
GNU utilities are horribly incomplete. Many Linux
developers seem to agree that man pages aren't
worth the effort to make them useable.
BSD, on the otherhand, goes to great lengths to
make the man pages clear, helpful, and complete.
Why can't Linux be more like BSD in that respect?
Re:Well of course (Score:5, Informative)
In Debian, every binary must have a man page explaining its use. It's part of the Debian policy, and a package not honoring this rule is taken as broken (i.e., it's reported as an error when building the package) So, again, Debian rocks :-)
Debian's uber manpage :) (was: Re:Well of course) (Score:4, Informative)
UNDOCUMENTED(7) Linux Programmer's Manual UNDOCUMENTED(7)
NAME
undocumented - No manpage for this program, utility or function.
DESCRIPTION
This program, utility or function does not have a useful manpage.
Before opening a bug to report this, please check with the Debian Bug
Tracking System (BTS) at if a bug has already
been reported. If not, you can submit a wishlist bug if you want.
If you are a competent and accurate writer and are willing to spend the
time reading the source code and writing good manpages please write a
better man page than this one. Please contact the package maintainer
in order to avoid several people working on the same manpage.
Try the following options if you want more information.
foo --help, foo -h, foo -?
info foo
whatis foo, apropos foo
check directories
dpkg --listfiles foo, dpkg --search foo
locate '*foo*'
find / -name '*foo*'
The documentation might be in a package starting with the same name as
the package the software belongs to, but ending with -doc or -docs.
Re:Well of course (Score:5, Interesting)
Undocumented software is basically worthless as far as I'm concerned. Software should be easy enough to use without having to refer to the documentation often, but the documentation should be there in case I need to find something, and quickly.
And you're right, it is restrictive. But if that restrictiveness increases the distribution's quality, so it's fine by me.
AND, if you're in such a hurry to use undocumented crap software, you can always just compile the source code and off you go, who needs a Debian package anyway.
Re:Well of course (Score:5, Insightful)
Fourteen months later...
What the fuck is XXX, what does it do, and why did I write it?!?!
Re:Well of course (Score:4, Insightful)
Then you have some idea of what your code is going to have to do...
Re:Well of course (Score:5, Interesting)
Amen.
I hate info. An unnecessary tool poorly implemented (implemented in the 'practically unusable' sense -- for all I know, the code for info could be excellent).
Okay, now that I've drawn my line in the sand, what differentiates me from everyone else on /.? Why do I hate info?
I pretty much already answered that above. It's an unnecessary tool. There exists no gap between "man page" and "html/pdf/tool of choice for 'real' documentation" that needs to be addressed.
'man' is exactly what you want for immediate access to practically everything (although I wish man -k worked better...) when you're in the middle of completing some task. All you need to know is a couple simple things, like how your pager works, and whether you're getting the bash or the libc man page for something when there's an overlap -- and even that could probably be addressed by adding symbolic names so we can type 'man libc printf' instead of the random 'man 3 printf' so we don't look at printf for the shell. But anyway. They all are arranged the same, and you can zip to what you need in moments; plus, in my experience the man page holds what I needed better than three quarters of the time. All that, and I didn't have to use a strange tree-structured pager that poorly identifies links and doesn't behave like lynx or any other similar text-mode document navigation tool I am familiar with.
For any documentation need more heavyweight than that, I probably want to be looking at something like javadoc or the python library reference, in my web browser. A web browser is very well suited to navigating hierarchal documentation structures (especially if they use their link tags well!). I have all the tools of mozilla (phoenix, galeon, konqueror, etc.) at my disposal to locate the information I need, and for a serious documentation need, I would rather be reading for two hours on a browser with good (well, better) font support than in an xterm. And for the doc writer, there are lots of tools available (starting with LaTeX, which is totally free) to generate these docs not only as html, but as postscript or pdfs for paper presentation as well.
So for me, it's a one-two punch; I don't see a need in the space the tool addresses, and I find the tool itself to be unwieldy. I'd love to see better man pages, as far as I'm concerned, it has far from outlived its usefulness.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Well of course (Score:5, Informative)
All that, and I didn't have to use a strange tree-structured pager that poorly identifies links and doesn't behave like lynx or any other similar text-mode document navigation tool I am familiar with.
info, the program, is just one (default) info file viewer. There's also pinfo (which is Lynx-like), Emacs, and the KDE and GNOME help browsers, among other things that read info-format files.
Re:Well of course (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well of course (Score:5, Insightful)
'man has just exactly what you need in exactly the right order.
First, the bare minimum - the name of the program or function an a one sentence
description of what it does.
Secondly it's usage with a well thought out meta-language - that is
generally enough to nudge your memory if you already know the command.
For functions, it also tells you what odd-ball header files you might need.
Thirdly, a *slightly* more detailed description - and a concise list of
the options/parameters - not spread out over many pages...right there.
Fourthly...more stuff...that you may or may not care about.
The information cleverly gets more and more detailed - so you generally
get 99% of what you need right there in the first screenful.
If I want more info than a two screenful man page can delivers, I want
it on the web in a browser in HTML. I don't want to have to learn another
markup language - or another navigation scheme - and I want a choice of a
dozen convenient browsers.
info does neither of these things - it sucks and needs to *DIE*.
Re:Well of course (Score:5, Interesting)
EXAMPLES!
man vs info (Score:5, Insightful)
I like man. I like man -k . I don't like info much.
A well written man page provides a minimal description of the program/system call/... and provides the information a user/programmer really needs quickly and easily. Do man in a terminal and use "/" to search quickly. Do man in emacs and get the ability to do more with the result. Do man: in konqueror and get more.
Info tends to provide long winded description of this that and t'other, usually completely unindexed, unsearchable and for most of my purposes unusable. Let alone that I now need man for some things, info for other things, html for other things and so on....
Personally I'd rather like to see an xml format that would enable documentation writers to build both html pages (I personally think "info" is obsolete) and man pages at the same time. (That is, with tags like <synopsys>, <see-also> and the like, as well as with tags to mark indexable terms). Ideally it should be possible to generate man pages, a howto, a set of html pages for users all from the same input.
But I'd rather have everything documented in "man" style than any of the rest.
Re:Well of course (Score:5, Informative)
info --subnodes --output - | less
makes it work just like man :)
Debian actually provides proper manpages for a lot of these programs.
Re:Well of course (Score:4, Informative)
Cool, now i can keep my sanity while reading the gcc manual. I always hated how info used links for subsections. Now i can search using / instead of that god awful emacs method. This leads me to the following distinction:
Linux is for people who hate vi.
*BSD is for people who hate emacs.
Time to watch more Cowboy Bebop.
Konqueror, man, info (Score:4, Informative)
While you're there, shove an audio CD in and try audiocd:/
Re:Well of course (Score:5, Interesting)
What the other UNIXes -- Solaris, Irix, MacOS X, etc. -- have is dedicated programmers who are paid to pour over the code to create improvements and nice custom little routines to make it all run nice.
Strongly disagree here. For years, as I became a guru-who-knew-all-the-UNIX-variants (from Interactive 386/ix to Xenix to System V/386 v3.2.3 to SVR4 to Texas Instruments to Bull to Motorola SysV/68 and SysV/88 to DG/UX R5.4.x...and many more) I came to be painfully aware of the commonalities between them.
'awk' as released by AT&T was carried forth, for many generations of UNIX versions, and every vendor of every variant invariably failed to fix any of the common bugs.
I applauded the arrival of 'nawk', where you could put as many comments as you wished in an AWK script without 'awk' crashing. And, as I've implied, this was the case on every UNIX I used.
At least my shell scripts were "portable". Bugs on one platform were bugs everywhere.
Those UNIXes also are written to work on specific hardware.
Now here you (and others before you in this thread) have hit the nail on the head.
From IRIX to DG/UX to AIX to Dynix (well, ok, let's skip Dynix, that's another soapbox), the vendors turned out an absolutely marvelous level of hardware control.
I was able to, on an NCR 4550 (12 processors) detect when a failed processor board (paired CPU's) had been "dead-LEDed" and taken out of service. With a 50-line C program.
On DG/UX, the logical volume manager - a system interface to not software RAID but to actual RAID hardware (c/o CLARiiON, thank you very much) is still unmatched by any other implementation I've seen. Amazing.
I'd submit that OS vendors know (read: think they know) where the money lies: in the synergy between OS and hardware.
<rant>
Almost any UNIX variant, when installed on some other vendor's hardware, would be no more than regurgitated AT&T SVR4.
Many, if not most, of these variants no longer exist. I'm among the last of the dying breed of those who can claim to have lived through them all - and made them work, despite, not because of, vendor practices :-)
</end rant>
Thanks for letting me vent :-)
Re:Well of course (Score:4, Informative)
I haven't seen this to be true. Whereas the idea is that info docs can be mroe detailed, and some very detailed info docs exist (for instance on the gnu programming model), I have found that in Linux distributions more often than not the man page and info page for a given utility are identical (even for gnu tools) and both leave a lot to be desired when compared to the man pages on practically any bsd.
Info could be more powerful than man, especially for emacs users (of which I am not one) but in practice the move seems to have more to do with politics than functionality.
Re:Well of course (Score:5, Informative)
If you've got KDE, just type info:foo in the location bar. You can browse info pages the way they ought to be: as html.
(You can also type #foo to get the foo man page.)
Re:Well of course (Score:4, Insightful)
And GNU's high horse stance on man pages just pisses me off. Manual pages still serve an important purpose even with HTML or info docs available.
Re:Well of course (Score:4, Insightful)
Borland had this right about 15 years ago. Ever used the help system in Turbo C for DOS? Veranice. Basically worked like a web browser. I miss it.
Re:Well of course (Score:4, Informative)
I know for a fact that only Windows 2000 Onwards (NTFS 5 +) had a thing called Changejournal which journals all actions done to the file system and are very useful for gathering the files that have changed since the last incremental or differential backup.
Here is my list (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Here is my list (Score:5, Funny)
Did Austin Powers do it?
Re:Here is my list (Score:5, Insightful)
This works fine in linux. If you're crazy you can even do it with IDE disks.
2.)I can upgrade the hardware while the system is running!
This is a hardware feature more than an OS feature. Linux supports hardware that supports hot-swapping. Hot swap PCI, pcmcia, USB, and SCSI are all great examples of this.
3.)I have 64 bit memory access and integers for workstation cad apps as well as database access. Type double in C/c++ does not allow enough precision. Int64 ?? I can use larger numbers with more decimal points.
Again hardware related. Buy an alpha, or an ultra sparc, or an Itanium, or... You get the idea.
4.) I have a scalable server that has supperior clustering software that NT and Linux lack
You need superior cluster software? I'll sell you superior cluster software.
5.) With up to 128 processors I can have one fast mutha.
Again with the hardware. Linux supports huge numbers of processors too. It's your i810 motherboard that's the problem here.
6.) World class stability. Linux has serious VM problems and the filesystem has been known to corrupt under large disk loads. Ask any database admin who uses oracle in Linux. Real servers need 24x7 support and linux is close and is very stable but has some rough edges in heavy server use. A reboot could be disasterous and cost tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. May god help you if your wharehouse database crashes or if your factory goes offline for a system reboot.
Give me a kernel panic in Linux and I'll give you one in solaris. Better yet, I'll give you highly available clustering software so you don't have to worry about those pesky and rare panics. Can't have down time? You won't even notice it. Really.
7.)WOrld class support. If a chip fails you can have an engineer from Sun with a replacement part be at your office within a matter of hours if your a gold member!
You're talking hardware again. There is plenty of world class linux software support out there. If you want hardware support you simply have to pick the correct hardware vendor.
I'm not saying linux has it all, but it's got everything on your list.
Re:Here is my list (Score:5, Insightful)
The poster you're replying to never mentioned Raid 5. He was talking about things like hot-swappable devices from PCI to USB to SCSI. In case you're not aware, RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) is a specification for concatenating disk drives in efficient ways that provide increased data integrity at the cost of storage space. RAID5 is one of the 4 that are commonly used (0, 1, 4 and 5... bonus points if you can tell me where RAID4 is most commonly used). So, while the technologies that the poster was describing might be applied to disks and/or controlers (and often are), that has no bearing on how you structure your storage.
As for "real enterprise"... I don't need or want systems that can hot-swap memory or CPUs. I want systems that do what I want fairly quickly and do a good job of talking to eachother. Everything else is negotiable. If you build your environment correctly, all applications can behave this way.
On to your points....
if [purchasers of hardware/software] have a certain need like lots of i/o, high availability or hardware then only Solaris and AIX is the answer.
Coming from a production environment which has a great deal of need for "lots of i/o", "high availability" and "hardware", I can say that Linux fits the bill very well. I've admined large environments based on Solaris and HP/UX in my life and I can tell you that Linux is not a second-rate platform by any measure. It *is* a product of its upbringing, and you *do* need to keep that in mind to admin it correctly.
For example, Linux supports a huge range of hardware. Some of it is supported poorly, but most of the stuff that you would generally get your hands on is solid. The problem is that while the software is solid, some of that hardware is crap. It's easy to think of Solaris has more stable than Linux when your average Linux installation is running on crap for hardware.
Yes, it's true, there are hardware giants (like Dell and IBM) pushing Linux on solid hardware, and that's good. However, I find the crap-box hardware to be more interesting. It's prices/performance in terms of raw uptime is truly staggering. This is how we build our environments. We buy dozens of dinky little 1us and configure the software so that we can pull any 10 of them out of the mix and no one cares.
I prefer this model, but your milage may vary.
In a wharehouse or factory a single reboot and disk check could take literally hours!
Why was it designed so poorly? I've got several terabytes of disk sitting in the corner, and when I reboot it it comes back in about 96 seconds. Mind you, I don't recommend storing terrabytes of disk on anything that runs a general purpose OS (I use dedicated storage devices for that), but if you are going to be that stupid, Linux is just as good (or better) a choice as the competition.
Especially if a database is installed and needs to check itself for corruption.
I hate to sound like a broken record here, but why was it designed so poorly? My database comes back from a reboot with a quick message about recovering any lost transactions from its log? Are you not using a real database? I don't like Oracle, but you might want to try it out. Works very nicely.
This is the same kind of environment where the systems must remain 24x7
There's no such thing. Ask the folks at AT&T who tried their damndest to build a phone switch that could make that claim. They came close. For millions of dollars you could shave off an extra 9. What did everyone learn? Mostly that in the real world that last 9 you just bought is a rarer problem than some idiot letting a cleaning person into the "super secure data center" with a mob and bucket. Oh well, chalk that up to expensive lessons and don't repeat it.
The point I'm getting at here is two-fold: 1) every major OS is capable supporting produciton environments... it's a matter of how you use them and 2) if you start off with the assumption that product (x) sucks and cannot compete with product (y), you're probably going to find evidence to support your claim... regardless of your local values for (x) and (y).
Good luck!
Re:Here is my list (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, as long as you're using SCSI.
2.)I can upgrade the hardware while the system is running!
If your hardware supports it. There's linux support for hotswap PCI, and I believe there to be support for hotpluggable CPUs.
3.)I have 64 bit memory access and integers for workstation cad apps as well as database access. Type double in C/c++ does not allow enough precision. Int64 ?? I can use larger numbers with more decimal points.
If the hardware supports it. Run on Sparc, Alpha, IA64 or HPPA. IA64 is probably your best bet - Intel are keen on Linux support, and more commercial Linux vendors support it.
4.) I have a scalable server that has supperior clustering software that NT and Linux lack
This depends on precisely which sort of clustering you want.
5.) With up to 128 processors I can have one fast mutha.
Which seriously compromises performance on the single CPU machines that are significantly more common. How much of the market is comprised of machines with more than 4 CPUs? How much time do you think the kernel is spending dealing with the fine grained locking needed for Solaris to scale to 128 CPUs? On equivilant single CPU hardware, Linux will easily outperform Solaris.
6.) World class stability. Linux has serious VM problems and the filesystem has been known to corrupt under large disk loads. Ask any database admin who uses oracle in Linux. Real servers need 24x7 support and linux is close and is very stable but has some rough edges in heavy server use. A reboot could be disasterous and cost tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. May god help you if your wharehouse database crashes or if your factory goes offline for a system reboot.
Shrug. I've never had issues with Oracle on Linux, but there you go.
7.)WOrld class support. If a chip fails you can have an engineer from Sun with a replacement part be at your office within a matter of hours if your a gold member!
That's probably the biggest issue. On the other hand, my experience of commercial vendor hardware support has never been wonderful. Being told that repeated machine check exceptions are due to software issues despite the logging software clearly stating that they're ECC errors doesn't result in my mood improving that much. And Sun is still sitting on 6 nodes of our E10K because we keep hitting kernel bugs that they can't otherwise test because they don't have an installation as big as ours. It's been going through commissioning for 3 months now. We're almost at 48 hours between kernel panics, too.
Unix on big iron is flakey too under load (Score:5, Insightful)
Loading up Unix/NFS systems from such vendors to meet the needs of multi-million customer ISPs can produce no end of nastiness in the native software of their machinery, especially in networking and filestore kernel functions. A professional outfit doesn't push its systems to such extremes by design, but alas multi-million customer ISPs have nightmarish management structures that grind exceedingly slowly, and sometimes planned capacity is reached and exceeded before extra boxes become available. In the ensuing month or two of desperate firefighting to keep the systems up, eye-opening problems sometimes arise that don't help reduce the general air of panic
Furthermore, don't think that having extortionately priced platinum maintenance contracts saves your bacon every time. Sometimes the response is extremely good if someone else has suffered the same problem and it's recorded in their support database and they have a fix. But on other occasions the big vendor's analysts just look in bafflement at the performance indicators and recommend extra boxes (well they would), and on a few rare occasions they simply refuse to admit that your very thorough measurements and timestamped traces indicate that there is an internal problem in their machinery. Now that's bad.
And finally
Fortunately there's more good than bad coming from the big iron boys, but to think that all is roses in that area and in big-iron Unix would be a misconception.
Re:Here is my list (Score:4, Informative)
Not only are Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) and File System (VxFS) available for linux, Cluster Server (VCS) is too.
I played with a VCS cluster at the redhat booth at a linuxworld expo--VxVM and VCS performed exactly as if it were a Solaris server.
Re:Here is my list (Score:5, Funny)
Why are you using Oracle? THe combination of GNU/MySQL and flat files manipulated by GNU/perl on Alpha will do whatever you want.
biggest missing feature (Score:5, Funny)
Who cares. (Score:5, Funny)
Forget scalability and stability. Get a list of priorities. geez!
posix 1003.1B missing (Score:5, Informative)
I was especially thinking to message queues
Yeah, there are other implementing it like RTlinux etc, but it's still not in the main linux tree
it's all i can think for now
Tape stuff for one (Score:4, Informative)
I'd like see some commands like:
scsicontrol -send scsi commands
scsiha - used to reset and probe scsi bus
stacker - jukebox control
Plus, I'd like to see more about a Linux tape driver.
Re:Tape stuff for one (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Tape stuff for one (Score:5, Informative)
scsicontrol -send scsi commands
scsiha - used to reset and probe scsi bus
stacker - jukebox control
Well...
apt-get install mt-st scsiadd scsitools sformat sg-utils sg3-utils smartsuite taper
With some info:
mt-st - Linux SCSI tape driver aware magnetic tape control (aka. mt)
scsiadd - Add or remove SCSI devices by rescanning the bus.
scsitools - Collection of tools for SCSI hardware management
setcd - Control the behaviour of your cdrom device
sformat - SCSI disk format and repair tool
sg-utils - Utilities for working with generic SCSI devices.
sg3-utils - Utilities for working with generic SCSI devices.
smartsuite - SMART suite - SMART utility suite for Linux
taper - Full-screen system backup utility.
Thanks to: "apt-cache search scsi"
how about... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:how about... (Score:5, Interesting)
On the flipside, I'm not sure if using an operating system that's essentially designed to be a clone of UNIX from a user's point of view is the hallmark of the radical thinker.
Hot swappable CPU's and memory (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hot swappable CPU's and memory (Score:4, Informative)
Haven't done anything by way of checking linux compatibility with ours, but the drivers are all standard enough.
Re:Hot swappable CPU's and memory (Score:5, Insightful)
Support for hotswap CPU/RAM etc. This is tough without hardware vendor support. Getting the info to write the driver (under NDA or whatever) is one thing. Proving the OS can actually cope with a CPU hotswap is another. Without high end hardware for testing, this ain't gonna be real. Solution: force the vendors to make Linux a priority on high end hardware.
Mature LVM. Mature enough that you bet your career on it, like HP/Sun/IBM admins do every day while barely understanding what's really involved. Having multiple competing (diluting?) implementations doesn't help.
>8 way scalability. If I had to pick from amongst my wish list, this would be one of the last. However, it does matter. For credibility, if nothing else. Solution? Hmm. Breakthrough in OS engineering, where the big boys get the scalability they want without compromising the low end. Ain't been done yet. But then, that's where the real opportunity is huh?
Compatibility with some significant percentage of the bazaar third party hardware in the world. Like EMC^2 arrays and the wild world of Fiber Channel. On one hand, Linux can/does thrive quite happily in the edge/cluster/small-database/terminal market. On the other, until you can manage a high end drive array from Linux (no, NFS doesn't count) that is where it's gonna stay. Only market share will make this happen.
Diagnostics that don't suck. Again, low level hardware vendor support required. So you paid extra for that nice ECC memory in your self-built machine. Do you know what would actually happen if a bit went bad? What would you get in the way of diag from the machine? Bet most of you don't know... Not good enough. Solution? See "hotswap" above.
Time. Linux is competing with OSes that are 3 times as old in some cases. PHB instinct is going to shy away from something less mature. Truth is those instincts tend to keep planes in the air, whether it fits your agenda or not. Linux isn't exactly new, but it hasn't really met the test of time yet either. Solution? Patience.
Software issues need fixing. GNU compilers suck. The native compiler on a *nix machine needs to not suck. This is basic. Linux has some real POSIX issues too. Threading only being the most obvious. Solution? Someone with the pragmatism and skill of Linus on the compiler/library side.
Mature advocacy. The way to be an effective Linux geek is to not try to sell it. If it's worthy of your advocacy, it doesn't need it. When opportunities appear, out in the "real world", step up. Otherwise, keep your geek mouth shut. Solution? Look within.
Wrong Question (Score:5, Insightful)
Just my £0.02 worth.
Re:Wrong Question (Score:5, Funny)
Hum. Linux seems to support "coma" all too well on my laptop.
[agree about NUMA]
Scale over 4 CPUs (Score:5, Informative)
Supposedly this is being addressed in the 2.5.x series.
The response to this is that even high end Unix does not do scale well over greater than 8 CPUs- every E10K or F15 that I have ever seen gets carved up into virtual domains of 8 or 12 CPUs...
An entry in TPC-C benchmark (Score:4, Informative)
Re:An entry in TPC-C benchmark (Score:3, Informative)
www.tcp.org/... [tpc.org]
RedHat AS, running Oracle 9i
Still a couple of things (Score:3, Informative)
1) Linux doesn't scale to large SMP systems yet. I think 2.6 is supposed to make it nicely to 16 processors.
2) Recently most (all?) of the big Unix vendors have included mainframe-style partitioning. You can do that with Linux on IBM zSeries and pSeries (and maybe iSeries), but you need another OS acting as the executive.
I can't think of anything else off-hand. I'd say that for the vast majority of applications Linux is as good or better than commerical Unix.
Re:Still a couple of things (Score:5, Informative)
the price tag (Score:5, Interesting)
A better question would be "where is Linux kicking the crap out of Unix?". Now *there* would be a flame fest. Note that I'm a Unix fan, but Linux has surpassed it as a developer's workstation and basic desktop. From the standpoint of an ASIC developer, that is.
JB
Here's the problem.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Now we hear complaints that it can't replace Sun on the back end.
Which one is it? A desktop OS, or a server OS? Granted, it does both well, but I think it's not the best in either category (no, not trying to troll).
It doesn't have the games and apps on the desktop (though it's getting better all the time), and it's not as reliable on the back end. We have a bunch of app/web servers in our middle tier; some are Sun servers running the lastest OS from Sun, and some are Intel PCs running Linux. The Linux machines crash far more often. Granted, hardware could be at least part of the problem.
On the other hand, we our database (Oracle) running on Win2k with dual P3 933 clones. One of our databases, with an average Oracle load of 10%, did not crash for over 300 days. That's pretty damned good. Our other machine (with a much higher load) crashes ever month or two (or at least needs a database-restart).
Perhaps it's time for Linux to split into two seperate camps. A version for Linux for servers, and a version for the desktop.
Re:Here's the problem.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Propaganda (Score:4, Insightful)
http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/aix/ [ibm.com]
http://docs.sun.com/db/prod/solaris.9u1202#hic [ibm.com]
Its not easy to remote manage hardware like SUN (Score:4, Interesting)
This is not a high end feature... but a feature critical enough for many corporate organizations to avoid linux.
The other think I love about Sun is the ease of Jumpstart. I always have issues with kickstarts on linux. RH8 doesn't even boot up on Del 1650s leave alone kickstarts. Sun puts a lot of effort in testing. I can't promise anything to my management without first testing it out on linux.... on Sun however, I believe them when they say XYZ version of software runs on SUN Hardware
Its not a big deal... and since both hardware and software belong to sun some would claim that I shouldn't even bring this issue up. But the fact is that these are two good reasons I don't enjoy linux in my corporate network, even though I love and run linux everywhere else possible.
rkt
A workload manager... (Score:5, Interesting)
However, if you manage a single machine with more than one application running from more than one department, you may need to determine the amount of ressources each application can use at minimum and/or maximum. If an application is almost idle, you may need it doesn't lock ressources and let other applications use them with a given priority pattern.
Also, partitionning is not available as far as I know.
Re:A workload manager... (Score:3, Informative)
http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/clusters/h
Works well.
LVM (Score:3, Interesting)
I would love to see some standard Logical Volume Managers make into Linux. I believe there are some that are kicking around, but I haven't seen anything getting standardized.
LVMs for the unaware are disk managers that allow such things as filesystems spanning multiple physical devices, dynamic creation and destruction of filesystems, dynamic resizing of filesystems, and other such goodies. AIX's volume management rocks.
Re:LVM (Score:4, Informative)
lots of stuff.... (Score:5, Interesting)
considering linux vs any general *nix based OS i can think of quite a few places where linux is deficient right now:
* scalability: linux needs to scale to hundreds
of machines and scale well. the NUMA stuff has
gotten into the mainstream 2.5.x kernel so it
should be a good step forward.
* a kick ass scheduler [yes i know ingo's o(1)
patch] is quite important. i still think
linux doesnt have the kind of scheduling
solaris [especially high loads] seems to have
but i will be glad to be proved wrong here.
* VM subsystem: lots and lots of work to be done
here. its been an academic favourite for long
and imho linux VM sucks badly........lots of
work is going into it though
imho not many people who read slashdot know about the linux kernel and OS specific strengths in depth - they tend to jump on the linux bandwagon just for the coolness. i think there are a LOT of issues other than the above where linux is not yet highend. true highend is "big iron" not the
mysql+apache+php webserver projects for which linux seems to be a favourite.
its just that linux is growing. its a long way from maturing imho.
vv
SCSI Support (Score:4, Informative)
High Availability (Score:3, Offtopic)
2003-02-07 22:32:30 High Availability Desktop (askslashdot,linux)
This is the one feature I'd like to see. Not your namby pamby heartbeats and redirection. But honest to goodness fault tolerance. I want a system that if I rip out a node will keep running and lose not a single thread. XSessions and DB handlers should not notice a glitch. Think VMS, Stratus etc. Add nodes, remove nodes, re-configure etc.
There's a reason most systems do not offer this, it ain't trivial. In fact most research I've read just says it's unfeasable and then goes on to spout about re-direction is alomost good enough.
Mosix, High Availability Linux, etc do not offer this feature.
Soft Features... (Score:3, Insightful)
From my perspective, the primary components that Linux lacks over the commercial brands is more in the realm of "soft features"...aka non-technical features!
The two biggest I would estimate as being (1)a unified product offering and (2) an active sales force...
To address the first issue, I would submit that it is both a strength and a weakness (depending on your perspective) in have the Linux operating system splintered into the many unique distributions. An obvious technical strength is in the niche-filling capacity of the several flavors of Linux that can and do meet the needs of an extremely diverse market... Alternatively, a "soft" weakness exists in the sense that branding/commercialization of a product with so many various "names" is difficult if not impossible! Linux in and of itself is a generalization of the group of OS's that are build upon the Linux kernel...that is not an easily sold concept to a manager who wants someone to blame should things go south!
As for the second concern of a non-existent sales force, that is a rather obvious (at least to me) down fall of widespread corporate adoption of Linux! Sure...every I/T department has a Linux zealot or two and can read positive write-ups on the benefits of Linux. However, this is not quite equivalent to the polished sales professionals (snake-oil salesmen?) who live, breath and die with the sole purpose of peddling their specific flavor of Unix!
Anyways...just some food for thought! As always, I could be completely off base and living in my own happy little world!
n2q
Linux != High End (Score:5, Interesting)
Linux is not an Enterprise level Unix. That isn't its niche. It's an OS for low-mid range hardware.
The argument for Unix versus Windows has been... Unix is expensive hardware with cheap (nearly free software). Windows is the exact opposite, cheap and redundant hardware with expensive software licensing. Trying to license Microsoft SQL can be as onerous as trying to negotiate an Oracle contract.
Are there other things available in Enterprise Linux? Sure, it's called licensed software. Enterprise level companies are extremely leary of deploying software unless it's licensed. They don't want to hear the word "free". "Free" in their minds often means there is noone to sue.
Also with corporate enterprise, there is a sincere fear of employee empowerment. No company wants to be held hostage by their employees. With Linux, the power is within the administrator to have full control over the operating system. Most companies have no way of watching the watchers to this level, especially with knowledgable, disgruntled employees. It's not a sound argument, but it's one that is often tossed out there.
Other more obvious things include mature LVM (logical volume management). Being able to add and grow filesystems on the fly. Active and mature SAN access. The VMM has come a long way from the 2.x kernel, but still needs to play catch-up.
You realize the ideal setup for an AIX 5.x server? You optimize the server (performance wise) for ZERO percent paging space. There are certain tools that come with the operating system at the kernel level you just won't find with Linux unless you're a kernel hacker... Companies don't have the luxury of hiring kernel hackers to administrate their systems.
Things Win2K has that nither UNIX or Linux have. (Score:5, Informative)
Win2k DNS supports Multi-Master Servrs through their active directory. What this means different servers servering the same domains can be updated and changes will be replicated to the other servers. Microsoft uses active directory to achieve this. Linux/unix could use LDAP to serve the same function.
I was reading about Win2k's file/print/active directory structure and I must say I am impressed with how powerful the system is. We have LDAP but it is not tied into all the rest of our applications and systems like AD is. If someone tied DNS, DHCP, Printing, SAMBA, Mono, Apache etc.. into LDAP and then provided a solid administrative interface it would _begin_ to provide the level of management and flexability that I am sad to report Win2k and AD provide.
You might ask yourself why would anyone need this? Well if your DNS is only static content then you most likely would not. But if your DNS server is acting as a dynamic name host for SRV or RR records supporting this for 50,000 could very easily overload the server.
Microsoft printing is much more flexable then LPR/LDP as far as I know unix systems have no capabilites for advanced features like distributing new drivers and define where the "closest" printers are.
Some people might not see this as a feature, but a unfied configuration interface (i.e. something like webmin but more flexable, documented, powerful)is VERY MUCH NEEDED to convert smaller IT shops over to Linux.
Re:Things Win2K has that nither UNIX or Linux have (Score:4, Interesting)
Problems Win2K has that neither UNIX or Linux have (Score:4, Insightful)
Consider this: the AD DNS zone is required to be in your domain container. This means two major things: ALL DCs in your domain have this information replicated to them (whether they are DNS servers or not) and NONE of your DCs in other domains can host these zones.
Stretch item one out, and you will see that when a user in Japan powers on his workstation, it replicates to my DC here in the states. Do I care to access that guys data SO BAD that his replication storm^H^H^H^H^H event hits my DC? Even though it isn't running DNS? Kinda silly, really.
Taken the other way, if I want a multimaster DNS zone to cross a domain boundary even in the same forest I cannot do it. It simply cannot be done. You could set up a zone transfer and work some mojo, but you lose the benefits cited in your post. Active Directory DNS doesn't support stub zones, either.
Active Directory 1.1 (Windows 2003/Windows .NET Server/Pick one) fixes these complaints with enlistable name spaces that can cross domain boundaries, but just try to get THAT pushed through in a large environment until 3 months after SP1. Not very fscking likely.
I actually find the automagical functionality of AD fascinating, and I do not mean to troll. I just find that most folks who extoll AD haven't seen it with over a couple of thousand clients.
GNU/Linux vs. IRIX/HPUX/Solaris/Tru64 (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Integrated systems management, ala "Sam" in HP/UX. Although I'm first in line to say that systems administration should never be handed over to imbeciles, Sam is easy enough that non-professionals can use it, yet it covers all the bases of systems administration from your hosts file through recompiling a kernel. It seems to be what Linuxconf wants to be, but isn't quite yet. It also does this without royally screwing up particularly hard-fought configuration files. Just use Linuxconf to configure network interfaces after you've set up a beautiful five-lne config and see what it does to
2. Transparent X configuration w/3D support out of the box. When the installers get it right (about 75% of the time), Linux + X-windows is just fine. When it gets it wrong, the iterations are ugly:
XFree86 -configure
(blah blah blah)
XFree86 -xf86config
(dumps out, some obscure error)
vi
(ad nausem)
I miss how trivial it is to adjust X on my old Sun. Then again, there, instead of hacking a config file, you had to hack some obscure command options. And setting up dual monitors on XFree86 is much better than on Solaris (or was, back when Solaris 8 was the standard, haven't mucked with Sun equipment much since then).
3. More on the X server: FAST X services. I've run XFree86 on really new, top-of-the-line Nvidia, ATI, and Matrox hardware, and not one of them can even touch the performance of X-windows on my old SGI O2. IRIX X is just amazingly faster. I'm not talking so much about 3D performance, but multi-head, full-window drag type stuff. Watching the ghosting as I wiggle this very screen I'm typing in back & forth on my RedHat 8.0 box at work right now on an Nvidia Geforce4 @ 1280x1024 is just painful. I know people are going to say "it's the configuration, stupid!" but if optimizing for decent X-windows performance isn't easy enough for a UNIX veteran of 7 years to do it without serious pain, it's not easy enough for an admin to want to deal with it.
NOTE: I optimized all 686 at home on Gentoo with Nvidia's drivers. It's considerably better, but still doesn't compare. Then again, I don't have an O2 anymore for real head-to-head comparison, so maybe my memory is playing tricks on me. On the other hand, identical hardware in MS Windows gives immensely better 2D performance.)
Then again, that's just a graphics professional feature, more than a server-type feature. Comparing any other UNIX to SGI's IRIX for graphics work is just no contest.
4. Memory fault isolation. On Solaris, I'll actually get a message telling me which DIMM is bad, and which slot it is in. Admittedly, this is a failure not only of the operating system, but also of the hardware design. When you have 30-some-odd DIMMs in some E10K server, if you didn't have this kind of isolation, trying to find the bad stick of RAM would be beyond time-consuming. Ditto for HP/UX when replacing faulty RAM. Once again, though, IBM seems to be adressing this with their higher-end servers, and I look forward to about a year from now when it becomes more of a common feature on GNU/Linux servers.
5. Something like "OpenBIOS" or Sun's OpenBoot (I think that's the name? Been a while, I forgot). This is great to work with, for instance, on Alpha systems. Fairly complete diagnostics before the OS even boots, and it all gets shucked out the serial port. You can compensate for this by installing some kind of lights-out management board in your PC, but if you ask any UNIX admin that has used the non-PC-BIOS stuff on pro UNIX systems, a PC BIOS just doesn't compare. For instance, on the Alpha I have at home, I can hook up fibre channel and enumerate all the available partitions, flag one as bootable, mount some filesystems and make changes, force boot to HALT temporarily rather than boot to full, stop the OS, do a memory dump, sync the filesystems and reboot... a whole lot.
GNU/Linux on Alpha/Sparc inherits these benefits, and so it is a non-issue. GNU/Linux on X86 still really, really sucks in this dep't.
That's about all I can think of for now. The difference between managing UNIX systems from Sun & HP, versus PC-based GNU/Linux systems, is still large but shrinking. As evidenced above, a BIG chunk of what still sucks about Linux is due to hardware & hardware integration, not the O/S itself, really. GNU/Linux is definitely getting there; I love running it on my Alpha at home, because I get many of those benefits mentioned and still use the operating system I love.
Too small and fragile (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Too small. It won't run on big enough boxes to do real datacenter work. My company runs data warehouses in the terabytes on servers with more processors and memory than Linux can handle. Before Linux can compete in the datacenter it needs to handle 16 procs at least, preferably as many as Solaris and the other commercial Unix implementations can. One other thing that is needed is for a volume manager and filesystem product with the functionality I can get from Veritas on Solaris. When you're dealing with 100-900 GB filesystems like the ones our databases live on the stuff built into Linux doesn't work.
2. Too fragile. I've never tried running big Oracle databases on Linux but what I've heard from people that have is that it is too prone to crashing and corruption. Plus the stability of the hardware isn't there. You simply can't buy an Intel/Linux server that has the stability and reliability that a Sun/Solaris box has. Hot swappable hardware, the ability to route around failures without a panic or reboot, and so on just doesn't exist (or at least is extremely uncommon) for Linux yet.
Both of these issues may well be fixed in the near future, but for Linux misses the mark too badly for me to even think about recommending Linux.
Re:Too small and fragile (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure I can. Just depends on the software load that you put on the system and its overall architecture. Solaris has advantages on some things, but its becoming more and more marginalized by Linux as it moves forward. As far as hardware on Sparc -- in my experience I have seen it crash just as much as Intel. Of course, you say Intel, but what Vendor is producing the materials for the "Intel" system? It requires a little initial fact-finding prior to purchasing the hardware as compared to Solaris/Sparc... since Sun is the only one that spits out those systems.
The software that I'm involved in is Manufacturing Control Systems. Our architectures are quite varied from factory to factory. We've run on Xenix, Interactive Unix, Solaris 7/8, SunOS and Linux. I wasn't with the company with Xenix, but Interactive is a Dog and terrible at filesystem stuff. We used that until Sun bought it and integrated it into SunOS to become Solaris. Then we moved along with it and began using Solaris on Sparc machines. This worked quite well at one factory, except it was a bane trying to train the customer on how to setup the systems.
Then we went to Linux. Linux brought us not only more bang for our buck, but -- on an OS level -- more stability for our buck. Yes, we did purchase copies of RedHat Linux
But, our next system was Solaris/Sparc. This time we used jumpstart and a bunch of nifty things to make it easier for the customer to get it setup. The integration on Solaris/Sparc for these kind of things is quite cool and I hope Linux/Intel can put something similar together. Anyway, we began using NFS in our last architecture and then used the same arch on Solaris/Sparc. Huge Mistake. Don't ever run something worth over 1 billion dollars on NFS/RAID with Solaris. Sorry. The downtime/crashing that occurred with it is way above the norm. It crash 2 or 3 times last year. Horrible on the network performance too because the system may have scaled way beyond Solaris' capacity. (60 Nodes communicating with 1 Node grinds the CPU terribly on Solaris.) I know I don't have the numbers to back these up, my only benchmark is how loudly the customer yells.
Our latest system uses IBM xSeries with dual hard drives in a RAID 1 configuration. Excellent systems. The per computer cost reaches about the same price for Sparc and I would risk to say the hardware stability is there. IBM HDs are extremely reliable and the design of the systems are quite fault-tolerant. Maybe in six months, when
The use for Linux in the Enterprise is here and now. If you cannot envision that, then you'll be left behind, plain and simple. The next stable Linux kernel will make it even more so.
Just my
Plenty of commercial features to add (Score:5, Interesting)
Display Postscript: Whatever happened to L. Peter Deutsch's old Display Ghostscript X Server extension? It seems like the last update to that was about three years or so back. Now that's a feature we would all love. DPS handles displaying fonts and complex shapes properly. We all know X isn't going to die any time soon, so a good Display Ghostscript server extension would be a Godsend. For that matter, with all the funding being dumped into KDE and Gnome, why did we all forget about GNUStep? But I digress.
devfs: Please, when are we going to finally transition away from static device nodes to devfs? Solaris had it right, dynamically name the device on detection after its physical properties. This is really important and hasn't been implemented for anything more than testing.
In kernel Framebuffer/DRM device drivers: The old GGI folks had it right. Physical devices like video cards should be initialized and managed in kernel space. Let the console and applications like an X Server talk to the device through a device node and/or ioctl calls and be done with it. No more video crashes when changing display modes, and real user space video security. Yes, there's framebuffer support in 2.4, but not for any decent, modern, cards. DRM hooks within XFree-4.x have come along nicely for GLX support though.
NFS: is STILL a mess! Christ, five years after everyone in Linux land finally accepted that Linux needs a major NFS rewrite and we still have to run BSD or a commercial UNIX for a decent NFS server. What a clusterfuck.
AFS support: OpenAFS is good, real good. But its licensing terms are unacceptable for inclusion into the main kernel tree. AFS is critical for enterprise quality network filesystem support. Notwithstanding, I still thank IBM for their initial code release and the OpenAFS team for the quality work they've done in porting the old IBM/Transarc codebase over to Linux.
Journaled filesystems: are here, but they're still a bit shaky for heavy use. They're getting pretty damn good feature wise though. A year or two more of long uptimes in the real world and they'll be rock solid for the enterprise. Way to go!
Raw I/O support: Primarily due to pushing from Oracle and IBM this has come a long way. But it still needs to be banged on for a couple years yet before enterprise folks will trust Linux for large scale database deployments. We also need a ubiquitous 64 bit platform to deploy upon. Alphas and Suns don't count because not enough folks run Linux on those systems to shake out enough bugs such that one would prefer Linux over DU or Solaris. I've seen Linux on an ES40 and it's not pretty. Which leads me to...
Mainstream 64bit hardware: This is not a Linux fault, but the fault of Intel. When are they going to finally release a decent 64 bit platform suitable for the commodity market? Un-fucking-believable that over ten years after the release of the DEC Alpha we still don't have ubiquitous 64bit computing. And these days RAM is so cheap we're actually running up against the physical memory bus limit, never mind the virtual memory advantages to 64bit memory management. This is just stupid. Hope AMD eats Intel's lunch, they deserve it.
I'm sure there's more... and JMO for what little that's worth.
Cheers,
--Maynard
Re:Plenty of commercial features to add (Score:4, Interesting)
Here's a few that I could think of... (Score:5, Informative)
2. Scalability - Linux needs to be able to scale linearly beyond 4 processors before it will be a serious contender in the Enterprise space.
3. 64-bit throughout - Sun has spent years removing all 32-bit bottlenecks from every piece of code that makes up the Solaris OE (operating environment). This takes a lot of effort and even when we see the AMD 64-bit processors this fall, it's still going to take at least a couple years of Linux development for all of the various 32-bit bottlenecks to be found and fixed. This is no trivial task, as developers at Sun found out during the move to the 64-bit product line in Solaris 7.
4. Enterprise Volume Management - I heard Veritas was releasing Volume Manager for Linux, but I'm not sure if it's out yet. When you're carving up 10 terabytes of disk space on your EMC storage, you definitely don't want to be using fdisk...
5. Journaling File System - Native in the kernel and runs on top of standard UFS. While we're at it, why doesn't Linux make UFS their standard filesystem? If Linux's goal is to be a Unix workalike, why not go that route? It's been good enough for Unix for years, so why not use it? To add journaling support to a UFS volume all I have to do is add "logging" to the end of my mount entry in
6. Enterprise Level Support - This is something that unfortunately nobody has provided for Linux yet. Sure, you can get great support from Dell on the hardware, but if there's a problem with the OS forget about it. If you have talented staff Linux isn't that hard to support, but what if your staff leaves or the brilliant Linux geek that architected your system steps in front of a bus tomorrow? If you have a platinum contract with Sun, you can have 2-hour response time 24/7, to anywhere in the world. That means if I have a remote box somewhere in a closet out in Timbuktu and it goes down, all I have to do is call a 1-800 number and a Sun guy will be onsite, have the problem resolved, and have your box back up within 2-hours. They'll even re-install the OS for you if necessary, not to mention they have a really great backline support team that knows how to analyze core files and can trace back through the stack to help you find the root cause of the crash. I once had a backline Sun kernel engineer that was actually able to tell me that the box had crashed because an admin logged in as root had done a "kill -9" on a process he shouldn't have. How many Linux vendors have support departments that good?
7. VOS (Veritas Oracle Sun) Alliance - This is an alliance between these three companies that allows them to share support resources. For really high-end OLTP systems like banks, telcos, financial markets, etc., they have a single group to contact for support on their high-end database cluster. These companies literally bleed millions if they are down for even a few hours, so it's important to have one group to point a finger at and get a solution as quick as possible.
Those are the only ones I could think of right now off the top of my head. I'd love to hear someone with more info than me give me dates that these things could be implemented by.
Google and Linux Scalability (Score:4, Insightful)
What's Missing and What's NOT (Score:4, Interesting)
1. Robust Journaled, Clustered filesystem supporting multiple concurrent mounts by seperate machines, with ACL and Quota Support, extensible by NFS V4 or other IP implementation, without giving up ACL's and Quotas in the process of networking it. That doesn't cost the firstborn's of all my staff, pluss arms, legs, and other vital parts of our anatomy.
GFS is close...but not there yet.
GPFS is closer, but has it's own API hooks that make it painful for some apps, and costs as described above.
CXFS hasn't been ported to Linux yet.
etc.
2. A quota management suite that stores quotas limits in a highly flexible SQL DB and applies them to the running system quotafiles via a cron job. Right now, lose or corrupt the quotafile, lose your settings...or restore from backup and wait while you update quotas on a filesystem with 16M files.
3. Access Database read/write access. Not strictly necessary, but would make that last-bit of selling SOOOOO much easier.
4. Games - never play them myself, but can't count the number of people who tell me they would move in a heartbeat for their home machine if only the games were there.
NOT missing
1. Large System Support
Got one with 1.8TB of user data files, 36,000 user home directories, and 16M+ files.
BTW, EXT3 is quite stable, thank you. Thanks in part to one of my staff who beats it to death finding problems with ACL, Quota, Ext3, etc under heavy load and SMP.
2. Performance - wind it up and watch it go...
Our mainframe thinks its a big day when they do 180,000 transactions in a day. Our network servers think its a holiday and everyones at home.
3. Full Commercial Support - GEEEZZZZ I get sick of this one. Of course it has full vendor commercial support. Pay as much to Oracle, RedHat, Dell, IBM, Consultant of your choice, etc. to support it as you do for a support contract for one of those overpriced OS's of yesteryear, and they'll happily support any damned thing you want!
Or, take the view I cultivate. Be your own support. It's cheaper to hire a couple of kick-ass programmers, and 3-4 hot young sysadmins, than it is to pay full support for scads of OS's and Applications!.
some Solaris features Linux doesn't have. (Score:5, Informative)
OK, I have loads more Solaris experience than I do Linux experience, so here are some Solaris features that AFAIK Linux doesn't have:
Re:Price (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.dwheeler.com/secure-programs/Secure-
"First, the basics. Linux and Unix are fundamentally divided into two parts: the kernel and ``user space''. Most programs execute in user space (on top of the kernel). Linux supports the concept of ``kernel modules'', which is simply the ability to dynamically load code into the kernel, but note that it still has this fundamental division. Some other systems (such as the HURD) are ``microkernel'' based systems; they have a small kernel with more limited functionality, and a set of ``user'' programs that implement the lower-level functions traditionally implemented by the kernel."
Re:X Terminals (Score:5, Informative)
From gdm.conf --
Allows me to have my windows and my wife to have hers. Switch between the two like two virtual consoles ...
I've never seen a non x86 box that could do virtual consoles ... and they were much missed.
(Oddly, Solaris x86 has them!)
Re:X Terminals (Score:3, Informative)
startx --
startx --
startx --
Has always worked for me.
Re:Rock Solid NFS is needed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Rock Solid NFS is needed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Rock Solid NFS is needed (Score:5, Informative)
SMB is not a replacement for NFS (Score:4, Insightful)
However, if you are serving files from a UNIX/Linux server to UNIX/Linux clients, SMB is not the way to go. NFS and a few other network file systems were designed for UNIX and they do a better job at preserving UNIX file system semantics. That really does matter in more "heavy-duty" applications.
Re:Rock Solid NFS is needed (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't get me wrong, I'm a Linux administrator now, I administer Linux only. We do have NFS servers, but we monitor them, and our machines are fault-tolerant IBM xSeries systems. Err.. well, fault tolerant fan and disk-wise.
How much more unconstructive can you get? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, whatever... And this is moderated as Informative ?!?
Re:Rock Solid NFS is needed (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux's NFS server support has gotten leaps and bounds better since about 2.4.14 or so. The "bleeding edge" NFS stuff works quite well. Is it quite up to Sun's standard? No, it's not. But it's getting close.
Of course, the perception of Linux's NFS support was probably done a fair amount of harm by Red Hat's bastardized 2.4.18 kernel that shipped with 7.3. BROKEN NFS client support out of the box with anything but Linux servers. Sent our big Sun servers into the ozone every time the load grew beyond "trivial."
If you're interested in good NFS performance, throw your Red Hat kernel away and build a clean 2.4.20, or one with the NFS patches* if you're running servers.
The patches are here. [sourceforge.net]
Now, the Linux automounter (I'm talking about autofs, not amd) behaves very badly at times, but that's another story...
Re:Unix (Score:3, Informative)
Re: Unix (Score:5, Funny)
> In fact, he fired an intern who logged in as root.
Shouldn't he have fired whoever gave the root password to an intern, instead?
Re:One thing (Score:3, Informative)
Ummm... XFS? (Score:5, Informative)
Or JFS - or is IBM too amateurish for you?
Re:One thing (Score:4, Informative)
Can you explain to me why ext3 being backward compatible with ext2 is a problem? Ext3 is very stable. I've used it for over a year on my laptop and have never lost anything, despite the fact that I experience unexpected shutdowns (out of battery) at least once a week. (won't comment on Reiser since I don't know enough about it)
Journaling file systems used to be a problem under Linux but it's no longer the case. Last thing, you're missing two journaled filesystems: XFS (SGI) and JFS (IBM). XFS has been there for years and is not exactly what I'd call experimental stuff...
Re:Jur-Ass-Has-Had-It-Park! (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, you must mean this 3D filesystem viewer on IRIX [sgi.com] (the page even says "as seen in Jurassic Park!").
Well, as it turns out, yes Linux has something like it [sourceforge.net] available.
And, on top of that, what other UNIX allows you blast processes [unm.edu] with various armaments?
Re:Jur-Ass-Has-Had-It-Park! (Score:4, Interesting)
That was a demo "file manager" like app that SGI had included with the original Indigo Elan 4000 machines. I'm not sure what crap they ran it on for the movie though (must've been an Indigo 3000 without the Elan card), as the movie made it look really slow and choppy.
There are similar projects out there for Linux/Unix/X, do a freshmeat search for 3d file manager and you'll probably find several.