[geeks] Re: kernel scalability....

Joshua D Boyd geeks at sunhelp.org
Mon Sep 10 01:30:59 CDT 2001


On Sun, Sep 09, 2001 at 01:59:03PM -0400, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> The real reason why people run thousands of linux partitions under VM is
> because they can and because doing so is much less expensive than any
> other option.  The physical and operational requirements necessary to
> handle the same load with linux kernels running on bare metal of any
> kind would be much larger and thus much more expensive.  I.e. that does
> definitely mean that the linux kernel cannot, alone, scale into the
> upper stratosphere of large computer systems.

Even if linux on s/390 bare metal could do the same performance wise as it
on VM, linux still wouldn't be able to partition the system in any
meaningfull way, which to me is the whole point of a mainframe.

I haven't heard of any projects to add such partitioning to linux, except
that new versions of VMWare can be used to add some partitioning.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd



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