will lack of corporate support kill off Linux?

[Jonathan Hutchins]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Coleman" <mkc at mathdogs.com>

> Jim Herrmann <b3d at kc.rr.com> writes:
> > Unix variants are pretty reliable, but not compared to the mainframe.
> > OS/390 has something like an average 99.9999% uptime.

> It'd be interested to track down exactly how and why this is (or isn't)
true.
> In my limited experience in a industrial Unix environment, virtually all
of
> the downtime seems to be caused by operator error, or, to a lesser degree,
> application errors.

I would say there are two factors that make the x390 architecture more
reliable:  parallel redundant hardware and perhaps the most strict isolation
of running code from the actual OS.  Programs can crash on a 390 (well, they
can either loop or abort), but system crashes just don't happen.  You can
pretty much replace the whole hardware system without ever taking the system
off line.  It'll affect performance (if you're using a significant portion
of the capacity), but the system will be up.

The worst failures I've seen were when an IO subsystem went out and took out
a few thousand users - maybe 10% of those connected - and while they were
"down", the rest of the system was unaffected.

Heavy Iron's pretty neat stuff, you shouldn't knock it based on uninformed
speculation.

(Anybody remember how many Linux servers you can boot on a single-processor
390?)