From: drew@ladymacb.cs.colorado.edu (Drew Eckhardt) Subject: Re: Intel, the Pentium and Linux Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1993 01:20:22 GMT
In article <1993Apr27.220743.9409@sol.ctr.columbia.edu> jerry@msi.com (Jerry Shekhel) writes:
>David Willmore (willmore@iastate.edu) wrote:
>:
>: >Ha! Like what, AIX? OSF/1? HP-UX? IRIX? If you think that any of these
>: >things are half as stable or compatible as Linux, you're in for a big
>: >surprise after spending the big bucks.
>:
>: What color is the sky in your world? Iowa State University is a DEC house
>: and; therefore, uses ULTRIX. Linux has years to go before it can 'walk the
>: walk' with full blown production Unixes like the ones above. If you think
>: otherwise, you haven't been sitting on the edge of the Linux releases and
>: living with uptimes in the hours and *sometimes* days.
Any system that isn't loaded should stay up indefinately. We have
several DECs here at CU that see heavy loads. When 60-100+
CS and ECEN majors finishing their assignments for Data Structures,
Compiler Construction, Programming Languages, etc. at the last minute
get on one, it goes down within the day.
>
>Actually, I always get the latest Linux kernels, GNU utilities, XFree86 betas,
>etc. I do *not* use networking, so I can't speak for that part of the OS.
>
>Yes, the so-called production Unixes usually have solid networking.
Perhaps in the kernel. IBM's NFS server (AIX 3.2) regularly unlinked files
without being asked (even "." and "..") on an 800M disk we had
because of a disagreement between IBM and the rest of the world
on NFS semantics. The statd on HPUX has no timeout between retries
after failures. Amazing how fast a pair of Snakes (66Mhz PA-RISC) can
swamp your net after this happens when there is no rpc.statd running
on the servers they're talking too.
>have you ever tried to port non-trivial software to them?
How about have you ever tried to administer all of them?
Some of them just aren't UNIX, especially AIX. AIX sticks it's config
files (ie, /etc/filesystems) in nonstandard places in nonstandard formats.
With a minimal amount of work, Linux looks like BSD.
>No? Let me tell
>you a little story. In our efforts to port our molecular modeling software
>to AIX/6000, we have uncovered enough "full stop" AIX bugs to force IBM to
>release something like 27 patches,
Of course, most people won't get IBM to release those 27 patches to
them, and will be stuck with a broken system,
>after which the X server still decides to
>crash every half-hour or so, usually taking the machine down with it. No two
>AIX patchlevels run our software exactly the same way. The DBX debugger
>itself crashes all the time. It got so ridiculous that we had to take our
>IBM product off the price list pending further AIX bug fixes. And please,
>don't even get me started on HP-UX.
>
>There are lots of areas where Linux kicks serious butt on everything else
>out there. Linux's C library is more robust and compatible than any I've
>seen. Nobody -- not SVR4, and not OSF/1 -- has a /proc file system as useful
>as Linux's. No 386 Unix I've seen (except maybe SCO) has hardware support in
>the same league as Linux. Linux is smaller and faster, especially under
>heavy load than any commercial PC Unix, and has a richer set of utilities
>available. The list goes on and on.
Linux hasn't even reached a production state yet, was developed
by a loosly coordinated group of people in their spare time,
costs nothing, and compares favorable to commercial unices
developed by large companies costing thousands. Really says
something about the quality of what's out there.
The few problems Linux has left (net code, no alternative to
sparse allocation) are fairly minor, and everyone has source to
get it fixed by 1.0.
>
>:
>: I'm just looking around our network here for an example or two. Ok, here's
>: a ReadOnly NFS server that's been up since Oct 1 1992.
Read only NFS doesn't put a lot of demmands on a system.
>For truly current releases, try DEC's OSF/1 1.2 for the Alpha and HP-UX 9.1.
>If you're truly brave, attempt to work with AIX/6000 3.2.3 for a while.
If you're truly brave, attempt to work with AIX PERIOD.
-- Boycott USL/Novell for their absurd anti-BSDI lawsuit. | Drew Eckhardt Condemn Colorado for Amendment Two. | drew@cs.Colorado.EDU Use Linux, the fast, flexible, and free 386 unix |