[SunRescue] OT: FS: SGI Crimson RE

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On Mon, 9 Apr 2001, David Michaud wrote:
> nick at snowman.net wrote:
> > You would recommend irix instead?
> 
> 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
> 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
> (ie, beowulf clusters--that's a joke, right?) crap, like Linux, running
> 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
> 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.
> 
> -Dave


Funny you should say that, because when it comes to linux on SGIs, SGI is
doing a lot of the pushing.  The ccNuma port of linux was (and continues
to be) done by SGI.  The Challenge work was reportedly done by SGI.  And a
lot of machines used for the indy and indigo2 port were donated by SGI to
porters.

Now, personally, I like linux.  I don't have strong feelings about irix,
although I don't care for their make tool.  Howeer, installing gnu make is
easy enough.  And boy o boy do those SGIs have some nice graphics.

--
Joshua Boyd