What High End Unix Features are Missing from Linux? 1264
An anonymous reader asks: "Sun and other UNIX vendors are always claiming that Linux lacks features that their UNIX provides. I've seen many Slashdot readers claim the same thing. Can someone provide a list of these features and on what timeline they might be implemented in Linux?"
Rock Solid NFS is needed (Score:2, Informative)
Oh, and I mean on the server side. NFS on the client side is ok.
posix 1003.1B missing (Score:5, Informative)
I was especially thinking to message queues
Yeah, there are other implementing it like RTlinux etc, but it's still not in the main linux tree
it's all i can think for now
Re:Price (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.dwheeler.com/secure-programs/Secure-
"First, the basics. Linux and Unix are fundamentally divided into two parts: the kernel and ``user space''. Most programs execute in user space (on top of the kernel). Linux supports the concept of ``kernel modules'', which is simply the ability to dynamically load code into the kernel, but note that it still has this fundamental division. Some other systems (such as the HURD) are ``microkernel'' based systems; they have a small kernel with more limited functionality, and a set of ``user'' programs that implement the lower-level functions traditionally implemented by the kernel."
Duh (Score:1, Informative)
Last time I checked Solaris/Irix/HP-UX/OSX have vast ammounts of commercial software available.
Tape stuff for one (Score:4, Informative)
I'd like see some commands like:
scsicontrol -send scsi commands
scsiha - used to reset and probe scsi bus
stacker - jukebox control
Plus, I'd like to see more about a Linux tape driver.
AIX (Score:1, Informative)
Scale over 4 CPUs (Score:5, Informative)
Supposedly this is being addressed in the 2.5.x series.
The response to this is that even high end Unix does not do scale well over greater than 8 CPUs- every E10K or F15 that I have ever seen gets carved up into virtual domains of 8 or 12 CPUs...
An entry in TPC-C benchmark (Score:4, Informative)
Still a couple of things (Score:3, Informative)
1) Linux doesn't scale to large SMP systems yet. I think 2.6 is supposed to make it nicely to 16 processors.
2) Recently most (all?) of the big Unix vendors have included mainframe-style partitioning. You can do that with Linux on IBM zSeries and pSeries (and maybe iSeries), but you need another OS acting as the executive.
I can't think of anything else off-hand. I'd say that for the vast majority of applications Linux is as good or better than commerical Unix.
Re:X Terminals (Score:5, Informative)
From gdm.conf --
Allows me to have my windows and my wife to have hers. Switch between the two like two virtual consoles ...
I've never seen a non x86 box that could do virtual consoles ... and they were much missed.
(Oddly, Solaris x86 has them!)
Re:NO POWER4 (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Unix (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Hot swappable CPU's and memory (Score:4, Informative)
Haven't done anything by way of checking linux compatibility with ours, but the drivers are all standard enough.
SCSI Support (Score:4, Informative)
OS supported need as well (Re:Here is my list) (Score:1, Informative)
I could pull a CPU and RAM out of a running Sun E3500 where I used to work. But what happens when there's a process running on the CPU, or a program in the RAM?
The OS has to stop using that processor in its scheduling, and clear that area of RAM.
Also, I could have two disk I/O boards in a Sun. I could tell the OS to only use one, take out the other to replace/upgrade, and tell the OS to use the new one. This is all done through the command prompt and the OS deals with the I/O scheduling. Can you pull out a SCSI (IDE?) board out of a PC?
Re:Tape stuff for one (Score:3, Informative)
Re:An entry in TPC-C benchmark (Score:3, Informative)
www.tcp.org/... [tpc.org]
RedHat AS, running Oracle 9i
Re:One thing (Score:3, Informative)
Re:A workload manager... (Score:3, Informative)
http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/clusters/h
Works well.
Ummm... XFS? (Score:5, Informative)
Or JFS - or is IBM too amateurish for you?
Things Win2K has that nither UNIX or Linux have. (Score:5, Informative)
Win2k DNS supports Multi-Master Servrs through their active directory. What this means different servers servering the same domains can be updated and changes will be replicated to the other servers. Microsoft uses active directory to achieve this. Linux/unix could use LDAP to serve the same function.
I was reading about Win2k's file/print/active directory structure and I must say I am impressed with how powerful the system is. We have LDAP but it is not tied into all the rest of our applications and systems like AD is. If someone tied DNS, DHCP, Printing, SAMBA, Mono, Apache etc.. into LDAP and then provided a solid administrative interface it would _begin_ to provide the level of management and flexability that I am sad to report Win2k and AD provide.
You might ask yourself why would anyone need this? Well if your DNS is only static content then you most likely would not. But if your DNS server is acting as a dynamic name host for SRV or RR records supporting this for 50,000 could very easily overload the server.
Microsoft printing is much more flexable then LPR/LDP as far as I know unix systems have no capabilites for advanced features like distributing new drivers and define where the "closest" printers are.
Some people might not see this as a feature, but a unfied configuration interface (i.e. something like webmin but more flexable, documented, powerful)is VERY MUCH NEEDED to convert smaller IT shops over to Linux.
Re:X Terminals (Score:3, Informative)
startx --
startx --
startx --
Has always worked for me.
Re:One thing (Score:4, Informative)
Can you explain to me why ext3 being backward compatible with ext2 is a problem? Ext3 is very stable. I've used it for over a year on my laptop and have never lost anything, despite the fact that I experience unexpected shutdowns (out of battery) at least once a week. (won't comment on Reiser since I don't know enough about it)
Journaling file systems used to be a problem under Linux but it's no longer the case. Last thing, you're missing two journaled filesystems: XFS (SGI) and JFS (IBM). XFS has been there for years and is not exactly what I'd call experimental stuff...
Illogical volumes ... (Score:3, Informative)
Personally, I've always found LVM to be a bit disconcerting -- but I'm an admitted Sun bigot who's simply used to Veritas. Everyone's mileage may vary.
Re:Still a couple of things (Score:5, Informative)
FreeBSD 5.x has it(Re:Snapshots!) (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Here is my list (Score:4, Informative)
Not only are Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) and File System (VxFS) available for linux, Cluster Server (VCS) is too.
I played with a VCS cluster at the redhat booth at a linuxworld expo--VxVM and VCS performed exactly as if it were a Solaris server.
Re:One thing (Score:3, Informative)
Here you are: not one, but two, both of them professional, industrial strength, quality software:-
- IBM's JFS for Linux [ibm.com]
- SGI's XFS filesystem for Linux. [sgi.com]
I have been running XFS for several months, faultlessly.Re:Jur-Ass-Has-Had-It-Park! (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, you must mean this 3D filesystem viewer on IRIX [sgi.com] (the page even says "as seen in Jurassic Park!").
Well, as it turns out, yes Linux has something like it [sourceforge.net] available.
And, on top of that, what other UNIX allows you blast processes [unm.edu] with various armaments?
Re:Tape stuff for one (Score:5, Informative)
scsicontrol -send scsi commands
scsiha - used to reset and probe scsi bus
stacker - jukebox control
Well...
apt-get install mt-st scsiadd scsitools sformat sg-utils sg3-utils smartsuite taper
With some info:
mt-st - Linux SCSI tape driver aware magnetic tape control (aka. mt)
scsiadd - Add or remove SCSI devices by rescanning the bus.
scsitools - Collection of tools for SCSI hardware management
setcd - Control the behaviour of your cdrom device
sformat - SCSI disk format and repair tool
sg-utils - Utilities for working with generic SCSI devices.
sg3-utils - Utilities for working with generic SCSI devices.
smartsuite - SMART suite - SMART utility suite for Linux
taper - Full-screen system backup utility.
Thanks to: "apt-cache search scsi"
Re:Things Win2K has that nither UNIX or Linux have (Score:2, Informative)
Re:NFS is needed? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I Got One... (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.redhat.com/licenses/rhlas_us.html?lo
Re:Tape stuff for one (Score:3, Informative)
Diagnostic, halt, start, inquiry and so on. Refer to this [sgi.com] manual page for more information. And yes, it's really needed often.
As for resetting, do you really need that often?
Yes, especially when you deploy fibre channel. Sometimes an adapter reset is the only way to get your HBA to recognize new LUN's, short of a reboot.
Re:Rock Solid NFS is needed (Score:3, Informative)
Don't trash the contents of
Re:NO POWER4 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Scale over 4 CPUs (Score:3, Informative)
Solaris scales linearly all the way up to 106 processors on an Enterprise 15000. This is one thing that Sun has been working on for years and has nailed very well. There are a whole bunch of issues that you have to deal with when you scale beyond a single board system. Now you have to have an interconnect (basically, similar to a SAN fabric or network switch) that let's a CPU on one system board access memory that might be on a different system board entirely. With features like a whopping 8MB cache for each processor, patented cache coherency technology, and a blazing fast interconnect, Sun is probably at least 5-10 years ahead of any Dell or Compaq solution. The Sun Fireplane interconnect gives you 9.6GB (that's gigabytes, not gigabits) a second sustained transfer between any two system boards, and 33.6GB a second sustained aggregate throughput.
Basically this is all done in hardware, so if a Linux kernel was written properly to take advantage of all the Sun proprietary memory interfaces, you could theoretically get the same level of performance by installing Linux on your Enterprise 15000, but why would you want to (other than the geek factor and the fact that it would be cool to say: I have Linux 2.5beta running on my E15K.. w00t!)? Besides, Sun isn't about to hand over all of their trade secrets in interconnect design to a bunch of open source developers. That would be giving away the family jewels.
Re:Well of course (Score:3, Informative)
and "info" isn't really that much harder to type.
don't forget, GNU likes to do things "differently"
Re:Well of course (Score:5, Informative)
In Debian, every binary must have a man page explaining its use. It's part of the Debian policy, and a package not honoring this rule is taken as broken (i.e., it's reported as an error when building the package) So, again, Debian rocks :-)
Re:LVM (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Rock Solid NFS is needed (Score:5, Informative)
Network Multipathing (Score:1, Informative)
http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/ds/
Re:X Terminals (Score:2, Informative)
I have 3 X servers running on my desktop, on vt10, vt11, and vt12. And on top of that I have 60 text virtual consoles, vt1-vt9 and vt13-vt63. And yes, every one of them is in use. I've changed the keyboard mapping around so that ALT+key switches VT where key is just about every key on the main part of the keyboard. For example, ALT+1 is vt14, ALT+tab is vt28, ALT+/ is vt61, ALT+space is vt62 and ALT+ESC is vt63.
Having multiple X servers running does allow me to switch between different window managers without messing up what I'm already doing. I have my own customized fvwm based environment on :0, a stock Gnome setup on :1, and a stock KDE setup on :2 (logged in under different userids).
BTW, the virtual consoles do work on SUN Sparc machines when running Linux on them. There's nothing particular about the hardware to implement virtual consoles. They just happen to be text in graphics mode on SUN Sparc, much as they would on x86 if you used frame buffer mode (that's apparently what's happening on the SUN Sparc machines).
Re:Well of course (Score:5, Informative)
info --subnodes --output - | less
makes it work just like man :)
Debian actually provides proper manpages for a lot of these programs.
Re:Well of course (Score:4, Informative)
I haven't seen this to be true. Whereas the idea is that info docs can be mroe detailed, and some very detailed info docs exist (for instance on the gnu programming model), I have found that in Linux distributions more often than not the man page and info page for a given utility are identical (even for gnu tools) and both leave a lot to be desired when compared to the man pages on practically any bsd.
Info could be more powerful than man, especially for emacs users (of which I am not one) but in practice the move seems to have more to do with politics than functionality.
Re:Well of course (Score:3, Informative)
While I appreciate a good info help file (esp. for bigger programs like Emacs) I prefer man pages. BTW cperl-perldoc in Emacs is great!
Re:Well of course (Score:1, Informative)
Well man is a pretty yukky system, it is not a help system that takes you from a problem to a solution it is a manual that will tell you the details of a command if you actually know what command you should ask about. To make it really easy the Unix commands are named using a Ceasar cipher (think rot13) so that folk using a voice synthesizer can control a Unix box using the type of sounds that Terence and Phil like to make a lot.
RMS does have a point, but the answer to a bad help system is not no help system at all. His Info system was an improvement fifteen years ago, but coupling the help system to the largest program on the machine ain't exactly bright, unless of course your real objective was to force everyone to use emacs.
The man issue points to the real limitation of Unix which isn't really a lack of features, the problem is the quality of implementation. I do not see a great deal of difference in practice here between the commercial Unices and Linux here. A Unix feature is not very useful unless the applications can make use of it which means that it has to be widely supported. Commercial Unices tend to have their strong points and weak points and be a bit better than Linux but nobody can afford to get too far ahead of the market. The application programmers won't respond.
There are a few features like a journaling file system that are really useful that don't need application support - question if Open source is so great why are journaling file systems only just appearing for Linux when the NTFS file system in windows was ALWAYS a journaling file system (and VMS has a journaling file system several years before WNT came out).
But most sophisticated O/S features need to be 100% robust and widely supported before any programer can use them. Back in the early days of the web I was asking Thau why Apache used per process servers with the hugely complex communications overhead that introduced. While some benefits were claimed for per process over per thread (mainly fudging the scheduler) the short answer was that none of the threads packages on Unix were stable enough at the time. OK so the threads package has been fixed but try writing a portable program that requires robust interprocess or even inter thread communication and synchronization? A synchronization mechanism is worthless if a single signal gets lost.
Re:I Got One... (Score:3, Informative)
Why would you buy HPUX when you can download Solaris isos for free? [sun.com] Heck, HP wanted $3000 for its Linux distro. :P
Developers Perspective... (Score:2, Informative)
1 - no shared conditional variables
2 - immature clustering
The lack of cond vars burnt us trying to wake multiple processes when a shared memory value changed.
We ran into problems with RH AS (and are still working through them) where one node would "shoot" (reboot) the other. If we were doing the project again I think we would roll our own fail-over capabilities.
Here's a few that I could think of... (Score:5, Informative)
2. Scalability - Linux needs to be able to scale linearly beyond 4 processors before it will be a serious contender in the Enterprise space.
3. 64-bit throughout - Sun has spent years removing all 32-bit bottlenecks from every piece of code that makes up the Solaris OE (operating environment). This takes a lot of effort and even when we see the AMD 64-bit processors this fall, it's still going to take at least a couple years of Linux development for all of the various 32-bit bottlenecks to be found and fixed. This is no trivial task, as developers at Sun found out during the move to the 64-bit product line in Solaris 7.
4. Enterprise Volume Management - I heard Veritas was releasing Volume Manager for Linux, but I'm not sure if it's out yet. When you're carving up 10 terabytes of disk space on your EMC storage, you definitely don't want to be using fdisk...
5. Journaling File System - Native in the kernel and runs on top of standard UFS. While we're at it, why doesn't Linux make UFS their standard filesystem? If Linux's goal is to be a Unix workalike, why not go that route? It's been good enough for Unix for years, so why not use it? To add journaling support to a UFS volume all I have to do is add "logging" to the end of my mount entry in
6. Enterprise Level Support - This is something that unfortunately nobody has provided for Linux yet. Sure, you can get great support from Dell on the hardware, but if there's a problem with the OS forget about it. If you have talented staff Linux isn't that hard to support, but what if your staff leaves or the brilliant Linux geek that architected your system steps in front of a bus tomorrow? If you have a platinum contract with Sun, you can have 2-hour response time 24/7, to anywhere in the world. That means if I have a remote box somewhere in a closet out in Timbuktu and it goes down, all I have to do is call a 1-800 number and a Sun guy will be onsite, have the problem resolved, and have your box back up within 2-hours. They'll even re-install the OS for you if necessary, not to mention they have a really great backline support team that knows how to analyze core files and can trace back through the stack to help you find the root cause of the crash. I once had a backline Sun kernel engineer that was actually able to tell me that the box had crashed because an admin logged in as root had done a "kill -9" on a process he shouldn't have. How many Linux vendors have support departments that good?
7. VOS (Veritas Oracle Sun) Alliance - This is an alliance between these three companies that allows them to share support resources. For really high-end OLTP systems like banks, telcos, financial markets, etc., they have a single group to contact for support on their high-end database cluster. These companies literally bleed millions if they are down for even a few hours, so it's important to have one group to point a finger at and get a solution as quick as possible.
Those are the only ones I could think of right now off the top of my head. I'd love to hear someone with more info than me give me dates that these things could be implemented by.
Re:A workload manager... (Score:3, Informative)
I'm almost certain LoadLeveler runs on x86 Linux.
Re:Well of course (Score:3, Informative)
Those are very rare nowadays. AFAIK, if upstream does not include a man page, the Debian maintainer is required to write one, if it is possible at all, explaining at least the basic usage of the program.
From my experience, most programs with the dreaded "undocumented(7)" man page are, well, undocumentable. Like a lot of utilities, libraries and daemons from both Gnome and KDE, which instead of man and info, seem to prefer user-friendly (read watered-down) Windows-esque HTML manuals, browsable via their Help interfaces.
Oh, and despite all the great things that I can say about GNU software, I too find the info thing very annoying.
Re:Well of course (Score:5, Informative)
All that, and I didn't have to use a strange tree-structured pager that poorly identifies links and doesn't behave like lynx or any other similar text-mode document navigation tool I am familiar with.
info, the program, is just one (default) info file viewer. There's also pinfo (which is Lynx-like), Emacs, and the KDE and GNOME help browsers, among other things that read info-format files.
Re:Here is my list (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, as long as you're using SCSI.
2.)I can upgrade the hardware while the system is running!
If your hardware supports it. There's linux support for hotswap PCI, and I believe there to be support for hotpluggable CPUs.
3.)I have 64 bit memory access and integers for workstation cad apps as well as database access. Type double in C/c++ does not allow enough precision. Int64 ?? I can use larger numbers with more decimal points.
If the hardware supports it. Run on Sparc, Alpha, IA64 or HPPA. IA64 is probably your best bet - Intel are keen on Linux support, and more commercial Linux vendors support it.
4.) I have a scalable server that has supperior clustering software that NT and Linux lack
This depends on precisely which sort of clustering you want.
5.) With up to 128 processors I can have one fast mutha.
Which seriously compromises performance on the single CPU machines that are significantly more common. How much of the market is comprised of machines with more than 4 CPUs? How much time do you think the kernel is spending dealing with the fine grained locking needed for Solaris to scale to 128 CPUs? On equivilant single CPU hardware, Linux will easily outperform Solaris.
6.) World class stability. Linux has serious VM problems and the filesystem has been known to corrupt under large disk loads. Ask any database admin who uses oracle in Linux. Real servers need 24x7 support and linux is close and is very stable but has some rough edges in heavy server use. A reboot could be disasterous and cost tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. May god help you if your wharehouse database crashes or if your factory goes offline for a system reboot.
Shrug. I've never had issues with Oracle on Linux, but there you go.
7.)WOrld class support. If a chip fails you can have an engineer from Sun with a replacement part be at your office within a matter of hours if your a gold member!
That's probably the biggest issue. On the other hand, my experience of commercial vendor hardware support has never been wonderful. Being told that repeated machine check exceptions are due to software issues despite the logging software clearly stating that they're ECC errors doesn't result in my mood improving that much. And Sun is still sitting on 6 nodes of our E10K because we keep hitting kernel bugs that they can't otherwise test because they don't have an installation as big as ours. It's been going through commissioning for 3 months now. We're almost at 48 hours between kernel panics, too.
Re:Well of course (Score:3, Informative)
Bah (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Scale over 4 CPUs (Score:3, Informative)
Now, that locking takes kernel time. Kernel time is time that's taken away from applications. As a result, while you win at the high end you lose out somewhat at the low end, and right now more than 95% of the market is at the low end (4 processors or fewer). Attempting to make a Unix that works well on the desktop and on the massive enterprise server or supercomputer is a really, really hard problem.
it's OpenFirmware (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Well of course (Score:5, Informative)
If you've got KDE, just type info:foo in the location bar. You can browse info pages the way they ought to be: as html.
(You can also type #foo to get the foo man page.)
Re:Well of course (Score:2, Informative)
Re:posix 1003.1B missing (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Well of course (Score:2, Informative)
True. I hated info for the same reason, until I found that it did have sensible keybindings (n=next, p=previous, u=up etc.), although not what we, having been used to Lynx etc., would expect at first.
I think that there should be some way to have Lynx-like keybindings for info. In my ridiculous opinion (IMRO) they should have provided easily changeable keybindings as they did with GNU Emacs.
As a way of clarifying by biases, I don't use either GNU Emacs or Vim (although I have tried them) for my regular work, being a GUI person. So please don't consider that I have anything against either of these nice editors.
Thank you.
GrimReality
2003-03-04 01:10:37 UTC (2003-03-03 20:10:37 EST)
Re:Plenty of commercial features to add (Score:2, Informative)
Up to this point I had thought it was a conscious and valid choice to keep the video drivers in user space.
However, I wouldn't be opposed to a choice upon installation: kernel or user-space video subsystem depending on whether the target box was going to perform end-user or server duty.
Re:Well of course (Score:4, Informative)
I know for a fact that only Windows 2000 Onwards (NTFS 5 +) had a thing called Changejournal which journals all actions done to the file system and are very useful for gathering the files that have changed since the last incremental or differential backup.
Re:Well of course (Score:3, Informative)
That doesn't help when you're in a terminal window, which is one of the big advantages to Unix. And a browser is overkill when I just want the basic usage. I have no problem if the man page has a web link to detailed information, but I still want the man pages.
Re:POSIX 1003.2 features (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Well of course (Score:2, Informative)
> if Open source is so great why are journaling file systems only just appearing for Linux when the NTFS file system in windows was ALWAYS a journaling file system
I don't claim to know anything about NT or its filesystem, but you make it sound like Linux journalling filesystems just came out last week... I've been using ReiserFS for at least 3 years, more like 4 (seems like I started in 1999). Of course it was pretty unstable and experimental back then, but I've heard NT was unstable back then too.
Google found me this directory of old ReiserFS patches [szczecin.pl]. The earliest patch there is for Linux 2.2.11, the date reads 12-sie-1999. I don't know what month sie is, in German, though, and of course timestamps can be anything you want them to be. Still, that's the best evidence I could give you on short notice that jornalling filesystems for Linux have been around longer than you might have known about them.
Ext3 [kernel.org] has also been out for a while. I don't think those timestamps are correct, though (seems I was messing with ext3 in late '99, but all it really did was crash a lot).
The rest of your comment, I make no comment on, one way or the other.
I realize this is kind of off-topic, but it's one of those little nitpicky things, you know?
Re:Well of course (Score:4, Informative)
Cool, now i can keep my sanity while reading the gcc manual. I always hated how info used links for subsections. Now i can search using / instead of that god awful emacs method. This leads me to the following distinction:
Linux is for people who hate vi.
*BSD is for people who hate emacs.
Time to watch more Cowboy Bebop.
Re:I Got One... (Score:2, Informative)
The flip side is that you have to pay if you're using it on a dual-CPU machine or better, even if you're a non-commercial user.
Re:Too small and fragile (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.ultralinux.org/
Re:I Got One... (Score:5, Informative)
Honestly. Vendor Unix is usually tightly coupled to hardware. The advanced features often come out of this coupling, and are hardware specific. Linux does need a generic and abstract logical volume management system - the Sistina LVM is about the level of Solaris DiskSuite, minus GUI. IBM is implementing a superior and backwards compatible system: EVMS. If this makes it into 2.6, Linux will equal HP/UX and AIX here. There is also NUMA and ccNUMA work going on. This will kick a**.
Debian's uber manpage :) (was: Re:Well of course) (Score:4, Informative)
UNDOCUMENTED(7) Linux Programmer's Manual UNDOCUMENTED(7)
NAME
undocumented - No manpage for this program, utility or function.
DESCRIPTION
This program, utility or function does not have a useful manpage.
Before opening a bug to report this, please check with the Debian Bug
Tracking System (BTS) at if a bug has already
been reported. If not, you can submit a wishlist bug if you want.
If you are a competent and accurate writer and are willing to spend the
time reading the source code and writing good manpages please write a
better man page than this one. Please contact the package maintainer
in order to avoid several people working on the same manpage.
Try the following options if you want more information.
foo --help, foo -h, foo -?
info foo
whatis foo, apropos foo
check directories
dpkg --listfiles foo, dpkg --search foo
locate '*foo*'
find / -name '*foo*'
The documentation might be in a package starting with the same name as
the package the software belongs to, but ending with -doc or -docs.
Re:Well of course (Score:3, Informative)
info --subnodes --output - | less
makes it work just like man
Thanks, that was a great hint! Immediately added this short function to my
function mani () { info $1 --subnodes --output - | less; }
Now the difference is reduced to one letter.
AJT
Re:Hot swappable CPU's and memory (Score:2, Informative)
Wrong solution, non-existant problem. It's a hardware thing, doesn't need to be an OS thing. But the fact is, it's already there. And the vendors don't need to make Linux a priority - they need to make standardizing the hardware model for hot-swap a priority. That way it becomes available with the benefit of competition on commodity hardware, and I'd much rather see great hardware features on commodity hardware than on single-vendor, high-end hardware.
Mature LVM.
Um, most commercial Unixes use Veritas LVM or Veritas Volume Manager - which is available for Linux. You can also already purchase hardware RAID controllers for Intel platforms that perform quite a bit better than Unix RAID controllers for the same price.
Having multiple competing (diluting?) implementations doesn't help.
That is a load of crap - sorry, but there's just no more accurate way of describing your statement there. Competition is good for software.
8 way scalability.
Um, where have you been. That's been there for a long time.
Compatibility with some significant percentage of the bazaar third party hardware in the world.
Again, you're just nuts. Linux is already compatible with more hardware than any particular Unix. And server-side, that's a lot less important than client-side, so I think you're reaching for straws here, since this is really only lacking in comparison to Windows.
Diagnostics that don't suck.
I'll have to give ya that one. I don't want to see kernel development slow down, but I wish the big "management software" vendors would whine or contribute enough to get a good, documented, stable API/platform for diagnostics worked in, because gathering all that info is certainly difficult and one of the few things I'm willing to pay for.
Time. Linux is competing with OSes that are 3 times as old in some cases.
I'll give you that one too, although I disagree with your solution. Patience is only part of the solution - the other part is pushing. Waiting without getting Linux used will be un-ending. Waiting while you quietly go ahead and prove its usefulness will be rewarded.
Software issues need fixing. GNU compilers suck.
Um... compared to what? There's a tremendous number of unix compilers that suck, trust me. There are also several very good (and pretty expensive) offerings for linux. Goodness is in the eye of the programmer, but gcc's done pretty well so far and there are other offerings available for those who need them and are willing to pay. BTW, you have to pay for them on all the other Unixes and Windows too.
Mature advocacy. The way to be an effective Linux geek is to not try to sell it.
Oh, BS. What are you, a Zen guide? Yes, maturity is needed, but not being quiet. Being passionate will get you a lot further than being "respectably reserved", and being quiet sounds an awful lot like taking the easy way out.
Re:I Got One... (Score:3, Informative)
some Solaris features Linux doesn't have. (Score:5, Informative)
OK, I have loads more Solaris experience than I do Linux experience, so here are some Solaris features that AFAIK Linux doesn't have:
Re:Whats Linux missing? (Score:3, Informative)
I doubt any emulator on a high-end Unix box could match the speed of VMware on IA32 Linux.
Konqueror, man, info (Score:4, Informative)
While you're there, shove an audio CD in and try audiocd:/
Re:Rock Solid NFS is needed (Score:3, Informative)
Of course, unless you are a KDE fanboi who only ever uses KDE apps on a matter of principle, you might find LUFS [sf.net] more useful, as it allows you to mount remote systems via SSH directly into the filing system, making them seamlessly available to any app, regardless of whether it's linked against kde or not.
Re:Google and Linux Scalability (Score:2, Informative)
Performance/system monitoring tools (Score:3, Informative)
Linux has vmstat, netstat, top and strace. Solaris has truss instead of strace (and I like truss better), the other three that Linux has, and also sar, mpstat, iostat and prstat. At least out of the box, anyway. Linux being what it is, I'm sure nothing prevents someone from writing these tools as open source projects, and maybe they're out there somewhere. But in Solaris they're right there, I don't have to go looking for them.
Surprised I haven't seen this one so far (at least not while browsing at threshhold 2), since I'm guessing that a lot of Slashdotters have had to chase down performance bottlenecks. It's hard to overstate the importance of good monitoring tools for such a job, and right now Solaris has the clear advantage in this area.
Re:Scale over 4 CPUs (Score:3, Informative)
The additional CPUs are called MaxCPU and are installed in place of the I/O expanders. While this can allow an additional 33 or 34 CPUs (I have seen both 105 and 106 as the maximum CPU count for the F15K.), what you do not get is additional RAM on the MaxCPU board. All RAM access must cross the backplane which helps to explain explain some of the linearity loss. You also lose nearly all of the I/O expanders as well.
For those of you that really need more than 105 CPUs, Sun is also purportedly working on a system to bond a number of F15Ks together into a large single image server. One Sun PS type claimed that Sun had a 1500 CPU server in testing.
Re:Dynamic Reconfiguration (Score:2, Informative)