[SunRescue] OT: FS: SGI Crimson RE

[Dave Reader]

On Mon, 9 Apr 2001, David Michaud wrote:

> IRIX is a proprietary OS for proprietary hardware. No other OS should
> even be attempted to be built or run on it. As to why anyone would want

once upon a time, *DOS was a proprietry operating system for proprietry
hardware. look at all that runs on x86 now!

similar arguments exist for Sparc, ARM, 68k, Alpha, etc etc

Do you believe that NetBSD should not exist? must be really really bad in
your book, running on all of those platforms!

> to, is beyond me. Why someone would want to move from proven, stable,
> rock-solid, completely scalable (ie, ccNUMA) hardware and software to
> hacked together, standard-less, undocumented, inefficient, unscalable

oh sorry, Irix is perfect! I see the error of my ways now. why do i ever
bother to use anything else? I'll scrap the whole lot and use Irix for
everything.. it has no flaws!!

..err, then again, maybe not.

> (ie, beowulf clusters--that's a joke, right?) crap, like Linux, running

no. if you'd taken the time to read about it, you'd understand that it was
built to solve a particular type of problem .. and that t does that very
well - in fact, it's continuing use and adoption is because it does well
what it was built to do.

> on flaky PC hardware is also beyond me. With this in mind, might I
> remind you what happened when your little MIPS/Linux port kiddies tried
> porting Linux on an Origin2000? The same O2k with 32 processors running
> IRIX performed ~13% better than the O2k with 256 processors running that
> hacked up Linux. There were a number of "benchmarks", which usually

IRIX is developed commercially. Linux isnt. IRIX developers have access to
every conceivable aid to get it right on that hardware. Linux developers
have to guess a lot.

Linux is known not to scale well on SMP systems - this might come as a
suprise to you, but not many Linux developers have 32way machines at their
disposal to test with! .. 2.4 is better, and improvements will continue to
be made. Why does that upset you so much?

You don't expect much do you?

All that someone did was express an interest in 'playing' with Linux on a
platform (SGI,MIPS) which he cannot do at present. What's he hurting in
doing that? We all learn by trying new things.

Everywhere people are using hardware for purposes which it was not
explicitly designed for originally. Thousands of embedded industrial
applications make use of commodity hardware .. i know this well, my
father's work involves doing just that.

> don't tell you much anyway... I'm sure Quake was one of them though...
> SGI has always, at least until recently, been way ahead of its time...
> in its graphics subsystems, and in its system architecture. Linux has no
> place shoving its way into places where it doesn't belong.

Really? why not let people use what works best for them? Who are you to
say where Linux 'belongs'?

I personally wouldn't put Irix anywhere near the Internet.

Now, especially with old SGI hardware hitting the market - much of which
will be unsupported by SGI now, what on earth is wrong with people trying
to make use of this? maybe you'd prefer to see it all in land-fill?

I've got a little HP box here which I picked up cheap (for less than the
value of the RAM in fact, and it has a disk), but the aged HPUX which will
run on it would be bugger-all use to me even if I could get a copy. Linux
& NetBSD give me a chance to do something useful with this hardware.

What are you doing on a rescue list if you are so blatantly anti-rescue?

I can do some things better in Linux than I can on any other platform,
similarly I can do some things better on other platforms than I can with
Linux. yes, I have Solaris here as well (got to keep it OT:)

Some of my sparcs run Linux. Go crawl back into your hole and Live with
it.

Holy OS wars get you nowhere. If you can put forward a well reasoned
argument for a specific situation thats fine, but no answer is the one
universal answer for everything - not Irix, not linux, not Solaris, and
not flipping bits directly on the harddisk platters with tiny magnets.


dave.