[rescue] Total corporate madness (

[Dave McGuire]

On Thursday, August 7, 2003, at 12:19 PM, Frank Van Damme wrote:
> I just wondered about it, because some time in the past I had a talk 
> about smp
> support and the BSDs with someone I know - a sysadmin who is a real BSD
> adept, as far as I conclude from it, smp support in NetBSD is still in 
> a very
> premature state,

   That was true maybe three years ago.  NetBSD was 
production-quality-stable on SMP x86 machines 2.5 years ago.  I ran it 
myself on a dual PPro, which I still have somewhere.

   VAX SMP support is rock-solid from what I'm told, though I haven't 
run it on a multiprocessor VAX myself.  Alpha SMP support is pretty 
stable, just not on AS4100 hardware in particular (and also CS20 but 
I'm not sure about that).

   SPARC SMP support was just integrated recently and seems to be ok so 
far.

   I don't know about NetBSD's SMP support on other platforms offhand.

>  while I know for sure that attention to this has been paid
> in the Linux kernel for a much longer time. Just trying to fill my
> misinformation gap :-) .

   Yes, I ran SPARC/Linux on a quad-processor Sun as my desktop machine 
four years ago.  It was fine (and fast) and I loved it, but it blew up 
every once in a while...which is why I pitched it.

   Linux on non-x86 platforms is also a "port of a 'very x86' OS".  I 
like Linux (as I do FreeBSD) but only on x86 hardware.

> Otoh. If you don't need 3 of those 4 cpu's... and you distrust Linux 
> for
> reasons of stability...

   Well, I trust the AS4100-specific issue with NetBSD/alpha will be 
ironed out fairly soon and I can reenable them again...in the meantime 
the machine is plenty fast enough.

> I cannot say I share the same idea about it, then again, I am not a
> professional, I run just a few small systems, I don't possess an Alpha 
> (or an
> smp box for that matter), and on the systems I run Linux, it's 
> rock-stable.
> My router loses his [1] uptime only when I shut it down because of
> thunderstorms or holidays, no quirks or problems whatsoever, and it 
> runs old
> off-the-shelf hardware.

   I dislike PC hardware, mainly because I'm an impatient and intolerant 
person.  Everything here that's "mission critical" (keeping in mind 
that I work at home, and if my home network breaks, my income goes 
away) is a Sun or an Alpha.  They're faster, more predictable, and much 
easier to manage.  I have some SGI hardware that's not in daily use, 
and my main desktop machine (which I'm typing this on) is a Mac running 
OS X.  A Powerbook G4 laptop, actually, connected to a 22" tube and an 
external keyboard & mouse.

> As for my misinformation problem :) , keep in mind I come from a PC
> background. My family has always been using PC's (except for an uncle 
> who
> prefers Macs), and most of my friends use PC's. Most of the time, I am
> preaching the bible of Emacs to those who are still locked in to the
> OS-not-to-be-named, taking into account other considerations then 
> running a
> mission critical fileserver. I get flowers and fruits and young virgins
> delivered to my door for it every day.

   You're a good man, Frank.  Even if you are a little funny lookin'.

         -Dave

--
Dave McGuire                 "You don't have Vaseline in Canada?"
St. Petersburg, FL                     -Bill Bradford