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?"
Well of course (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously though, feasibly any Unix feature could be added to Linux, it just takes time and man power.
Here is my list (Score:5, Insightful)
NO POWER4 (Score:2, Insightful)
Hot swappable CPU's and memory (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong Question (Score:5, Insightful)
Just my £0.02 worth.
One thing (Score:2, Insightful)
EXT3 is a backwards hack and Reiser, while good, is perpetually in the "testing" phase.
I'd even extrapolate that to fault tolerance in general. When linux goes down, it goes down hard.
Here's the problem.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Now we hear complaints that it can't replace Sun on the back end.
Which one is it? A desktop OS, or a server OS? Granted, it does both well, but I think it's not the best in either category (no, not trying to troll).
It doesn't have the games and apps on the desktop (though it's getting better all the time), and it's not as reliable on the back end. We have a bunch of app/web servers in our middle tier; some are Sun servers running the lastest OS from Sun, and some are Intel PCs running Linux. The Linux machines crash far more often. Granted, hardware could be at least part of the problem.
On the other hand, we our database (Oracle) running on Win2k with dual P3 933 clones. One of our databases, with an average Oracle load of 10%, did not crash for over 300 days. That's pretty damned good. Our other machine (with a much higher load) crashes ever month or two (or at least needs a database-restart).
Perhaps it's time for Linux to split into two seperate camps. A version for Linux for servers, and a version for the desktop.
Just my opinion... (Score:1, Insightful)
Propaganda (Score:4, Insightful)
http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/aix/ [ibm.com]
http://docs.sun.com/db/prod/solaris.9u1202#hic [ibm.com]
Re:Rock Solid NFS is needed (Score:5, Insightful)
Desktop or Server? (Score:2, Insightful)
Server:Sun/HP/IBM look at Unix as a server solution. In order for Linux to compete with Unix in the enterprise data center, there needs to be a unified support model (RedHat, IBM, HP, etc. are beginning to address this). More SMP support (dozens of processors), memory addressing capabilities, etc. Mostly what it needs is more time and exposure - people will come around.
Desktop:All it needs is to "be there". All other desktop 'unixes' are painful compared to what is available from Gnome, KDE, or Windows Manager.
How much more unconstructive can you get? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, whatever... And this is moderated as Informative ?!?
Re:Here is my list (Score:1, Insightful)
Soft Features... (Score:3, Insightful)
From my perspective, the primary components that Linux lacks over the commercial brands is more in the realm of "soft features"...aka non-technical features!
The two biggest I would estimate as being (1)a unified product offering and (2) an active sales force...
To address the first issue, I would submit that it is both a strength and a weakness (depending on your perspective) in have the Linux operating system splintered into the many unique distributions. An obvious technical strength is in the niche-filling capacity of the several flavors of Linux that can and do meet the needs of an extremely diverse market... Alternatively, a "soft" weakness exists in the sense that branding/commercialization of a product with so many various "names" is difficult if not impossible! Linux in and of itself is a generalization of the group of OS's that are build upon the Linux kernel...that is not an easily sold concept to a manager who wants someone to blame should things go south!
As for the second concern of a non-existent sales force, that is a rather obvious (at least to me) down fall of widespread corporate adoption of Linux! Sure...every I/T department has a Linux zealot or two and can read positive write-ups on the benefits of Linux. However, this is not quite equivalent to the polished sales professionals (snake-oil salesmen?) who live, breath and die with the sole purpose of peddling their specific flavor of Unix!
Anyways...just some food for thought! As always, I could be completely off base and living in my own happy little world!
n2q
Intel hardware ... Not what works (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Scale over 4 CPUs (Score:2, Insightful)
This means that adding 8 CPUs does not perform your computation at 8x, but some lesser multiplier. If you have a particularly compute intensive problem, perhaps you want to add 64 CPUs to the problem...
Supposedly the kernel developers currently debate how to scale to support such high end systems. Some have suggested implementing virtual partitions of machines, which is exactly how Solaris does on the E10K- so a 64 CPU machine actually functions as 4 16 CPU machines...
Others would suggest that the problem should not be resolved by trying to divide computational problems on the same host, but straddle them across hosts, such as Beowulf is supposed to do (again not in my realm of experience...)
Re:Scale over 4 CPUs (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:so? (Score:3, Insightful)
Gigabit ethernet between two boxes in a beowulf cluster may be nice, but how does it compare to passing data back and forth over shared memory segments?
AIX's partioning system .. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Scale over 4 CPUs (Score:2, Insightful)
We are currently performance testing 24 CPU configs and with the intention to scale to 60 when we get the kit. 4 -> 24 has been linear improvement so far.
I agree with the sentiment. 8 and 16 way motherboards/backplanes would be made properly, as opposed to the consumer grade items that Linux currently runs on. Linux would finally have a chance at running a big Oracle DB on decent hardware. This can only be a good thing in terms of good publicity.
Re:Well of course (Score:5, Insightful)
The FSF has for some unfathomable reason decided
that man pages are obsolete and so man pages for
GNU utilities are horribly incomplete. Many Linux
developers seem to agree that man pages aren't
worth the effort to make them useable.
BSD, on the otherhand, goes to great lengths to
make the man pages clear, helpful, and complete.
Why can't Linux be more like BSD in that respect?
Re:What I want to see in Linux... (Score:1, Insightful)
The FreeBSD kernel in the 4.X series was not multi-threaded (only one app could be in the kernel at any one time); the 5.X series remedies this situation (though not everything has been cleared of the Giant lock).
Disclaimer: I use FreeBSD on my home system and on my laptop.
Re:Here's the problem.... (Score:4, Insightful)
GNU/Linux vs. IRIX/HPUX/Solaris/Tru64 (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Integrated systems management, ala "Sam" in HP/UX. Although I'm first in line to say that systems administration should never be handed over to imbeciles, Sam is easy enough that non-professionals can use it, yet it covers all the bases of systems administration from your hosts file through recompiling a kernel. It seems to be what Linuxconf wants to be, but isn't quite yet. It also does this without royally screwing up particularly hard-fought configuration files. Just use Linuxconf to configure network interfaces after you've set up a beautiful five-lne config and see what it does to
2. Transparent X configuration w/3D support out of the box. When the installers get it right (about 75% of the time), Linux + X-windows is just fine. When it gets it wrong, the iterations are ugly:
XFree86 -configure
(blah blah blah)
XFree86 -xf86config
(dumps out, some obscure error)
vi
(ad nausem)
I miss how trivial it is to adjust X on my old Sun. Then again, there, instead of hacking a config file, you had to hack some obscure command options. And setting up dual monitors on XFree86 is much better than on Solaris (or was, back when Solaris 8 was the standard, haven't mucked with Sun equipment much since then).
3. More on the X server: FAST X services. I've run XFree86 on really new, top-of-the-line Nvidia, ATI, and Matrox hardware, and not one of them can even touch the performance of X-windows on my old SGI O2. IRIX X is just amazingly faster. I'm not talking so much about 3D performance, but multi-head, full-window drag type stuff. Watching the ghosting as I wiggle this very screen I'm typing in back & forth on my RedHat 8.0 box at work right now on an Nvidia Geforce4 @ 1280x1024 is just painful. I know people are going to say "it's the configuration, stupid!" but if optimizing for decent X-windows performance isn't easy enough for a UNIX veteran of 7 years to do it without serious pain, it's not easy enough for an admin to want to deal with it.
NOTE: I optimized all 686 at home on Gentoo with Nvidia's drivers. It's considerably better, but still doesn't compare. Then again, I don't have an O2 anymore for real head-to-head comparison, so maybe my memory is playing tricks on me. On the other hand, identical hardware in MS Windows gives immensely better 2D performance.)
Then again, that's just a graphics professional feature, more than a server-type feature. Comparing any other UNIX to SGI's IRIX for graphics work is just no contest.
4. Memory fault isolation. On Solaris, I'll actually get a message telling me which DIMM is bad, and which slot it is in. Admittedly, this is a failure not only of the operating system, but also of the hardware design. When you have 30-some-odd DIMMs in some E10K server, if you didn't have this kind of isolation, trying to find the bad stick of RAM would be beyond time-consuming. Ditto for HP/UX when replacing faulty RAM. Once again, though, IBM seems to be adressing this with their higher-end servers, and I look forward to about a year from now when it becomes more of a common feature on GNU/Linux servers.
5. Something like "OpenBIOS" or Sun's OpenBoot (I think that's the name? Been a while, I forgot). This is great to work with, for instance, on Alpha systems. Fairly complete diagnostics before the OS even boots, and it all gets shucked out the serial port. You can compensate for this by installing some kind of lights-out management board in your PC, but if you ask any UNIX admin that has used the non-PC-BIOS stuff on pro UNIX systems, a PC BIOS just doesn't compare. For instance, on the Alpha I have at home, I can hook up fibre channel and enumerate all the available partitions, flag one as bootable, mount some filesystems and make changes, force boot to HALT temporarily rather than boot to full, stop the OS, do a memory dump, sync the filesystems and reboot... a whole lot.
GNU/Linux on Alpha/Sparc inherits these benefits, and so it is a non-issue. GNU/Linux on X86 still really, really sucks in this dep't.
That's about all I can think of for now. The difference between managing UNIX systems from Sun & HP, versus PC-based GNU/Linux systems, is still large but shrinking. As evidenced above, a BIG chunk of what still sucks about Linux is due to hardware & hardware integration, not the O/S itself, really. GNU/Linux is definitely getting there; I love running it on my Alpha at home, because I get many of those benefits mentioned and still use the operating system I love.
system information (Score:3, Insightful)
what linux is missing... (Score:3, Insightful)
Too small and fragile (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Too small. It won't run on big enough boxes to do real datacenter work. My company runs data warehouses in the terabytes on servers with more processors and memory than Linux can handle. Before Linux can compete in the datacenter it needs to handle 16 procs at least, preferably as many as Solaris and the other commercial Unix implementations can. One other thing that is needed is for a volume manager and filesystem product with the functionality I can get from Veritas on Solaris. When you're dealing with 100-900 GB filesystems like the ones our databases live on the stuff built into Linux doesn't work.
2. Too fragile. I've never tried running big Oracle databases on Linux but what I've heard from people that have is that it is too prone to crashing and corruption. Plus the stability of the hardware isn't there. You simply can't buy an Intel/Linux server that has the stability and reliability that a Sun/Solaris box has. Hot swappable hardware, the ability to route around failures without a panic or reboot, and so on just doesn't exist (or at least is extremely uncommon) for Linux yet.
Both of these issues may well be fixed in the near future, but for Linux misses the mark too badly for me to even think about recommending Linux.
Linux Could Be Too Portable For It's Own Good (Score:2, Insightful)
"Old School" UNIX traditionally runs on a small set of proprietary hardware. Less support means more bandwidth for features and hardware-specific implementations. Also, this means fewer hardware configurations need to be tested for reliability.
Re:Rock Solid NFS is needed (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux's NFS server support has gotten leaps and bounds better since about 2.4.14 or so. The "bleeding edge" NFS stuff works quite well. Is it quite up to Sun's standard? No, it's not. But it's getting close.
Of course, the perception of Linux's NFS support was probably done a fair amount of harm by Red Hat's bastardized 2.4.18 kernel that shipped with 7.3. BROKEN NFS client support out of the box with anything but Linux servers. Sent our big Sun servers into the ozone every time the load grew beyond "trivial."
If you're interested in good NFS performance, throw your Red Hat kernel away and build a clean 2.4.20, or one with the NFS patches* if you're running servers.
The patches are here. [sourceforge.net]
Now, the Linux automounter (I'm talking about autofs, not amd) behaves very badly at times, but that's another story...
NIS/automounter fixes (Score:3, Insightful)
C'mon, we've known that 1024 recv and xmit are really bad values, why is that still the default instead of 8192?
Re:Here is my list (Score:5, Insightful)
This works fine in linux. If you're crazy you can even do it with IDE disks.
2.)I can upgrade the hardware while the system is running!
This is a hardware feature more than an OS feature. Linux supports hardware that supports hot-swapping. Hot swap PCI, pcmcia, USB, and SCSI are all great examples of this.
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.
Again hardware related. Buy an alpha, or an ultra sparc, or an Itanium, or... You get the idea.
4.) I have a scalable server that has supperior clustering software that NT and Linux lack
You need superior cluster software? I'll sell you superior cluster software.
5.) With up to 128 processors I can have one fast mutha.
Again with the hardware. Linux supports huge numbers of processors too. It's your i810 motherboard that's the problem here.
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.
Give me a kernel panic in Linux and I'll give you one in solaris. Better yet, I'll give you highly available clustering software so you don't have to worry about those pesky and rare panics. Can't have down time? You won't even notice it. Really.
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!
You're talking hardware again. There is plenty of world class linux software support out there. If you want hardware support you simply have to pick the correct hardware vendor.
I'm not saying linux has it all, but it's got everything on your list.
Re:One thing (Score:3, Insightful)
Being "stable" on your laptop means nothing. The question is about high-end Unix servers, very heavy load, mission critical complex apps.
XFS (SGI) and JFS (IBM). XFS has been there for years and is not exactly what I'd call experimental stuff...
Obviously those file systems have been around, but their implementations are still "experimental" under Linux; even though they have been working on implementations for some time now.
Re:Well of course (Score:4, Insightful)
And GNU's high horse stance on man pages just pisses me off. Manual pages still serve an important purpose even with HTML or info docs available.
Re:Wrong Question (Score:3, Insightful)
The Application Binary Interface (ABI) is the interface between the operating system and executable applications at the compiled binary level.
...and, to say something on topic, I disagree with the original poster. Unix is not a standard, Posix is a standard. Unix was an operating system developed back in the '70s, which has evolved and forked over the years into a number of different operatings systems, all collectively referred to as Unices, as well as a mostly source compatible workalikes such as Linux. All of those different Unices offer similar interfaces and implement standards such as Posix to differing degrees of conformity. Above and beyond those standards, each Unix offers its own set of features that set it apart from all of its bretheren, and discussing those features is quite valid. Of course, that doesn't mean more standards wouldn't be a good thing.
Re:Well of course (Score:5, Insightful)
'man has just exactly what you need in exactly the right order.
First, the bare minimum - the name of the program or function an a one sentence
description of what it does.
Secondly it's usage with a well thought out meta-language - that is
generally enough to nudge your memory if you already know the command.
For functions, it also tells you what odd-ball header files you might need.
Thirdly, a *slightly* more detailed description - and a concise list of
the options/parameters - not spread out over many pages...right there.
Fourthly...more stuff...that you may or may not care about.
The information cleverly gets more and more detailed - so you generally
get 99% of what you need right there in the first screenful.
If I want more info than a two screenful man page can delivers, I want
it on the web in a browser in HTML. I don't want to have to learn another
markup language - or another navigation scheme - and I want a choice of a
dozen convenient browsers.
info does neither of these things - it sucks and needs to *DIE*.
Re:Well of course (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well of course (Score:4, Insightful)
Borland had this right about 15 years ago. Ever used the help system in Turbo C for DOS? Veranice. Basically worked like a web browser. I miss it.
SMB is not a replacement for NFS (Score:4, Insightful)
However, if you are serving files from a UNIX/Linux server to UNIX/Linux clients, SMB is not the way to go. NFS and a few other network file systems were designed for UNIX and they do a better job at preserving UNIX file system semantics. That really does matter in more "heavy-duty" applications.
Unix on big iron is flakey too under load (Score:5, Insightful)
Loading up Unix/NFS systems from such vendors to meet the needs of multi-million customer ISPs can produce no end of nastiness in the native software of their machinery, especially in networking and filestore kernel functions. A professional outfit doesn't push its systems to such extremes by design, but alas multi-million customer ISPs have nightmarish management structures that grind exceedingly slowly, and sometimes planned capacity is reached and exceeded before extra boxes become available. In the ensuing month or two of desperate firefighting to keep the systems up, eye-opening problems sometimes arise that don't help reduce the general air of panic
Furthermore, don't think that having extortionately priced platinum maintenance contracts saves your bacon every time. Sometimes the response is extremely good if someone else has suffered the same problem and it's recorded in their support database and they have a fix. But on other occasions the big vendor's analysts just look in bafflement at the performance indicators and recommend extra boxes (well they would), and on a few rare occasions they simply refuse to admit that your very thorough measurements and timestamped traces indicate that there is an internal problem in their machinery. Now that's bad.
And finally
Fortunately there's more good than bad coming from the big iron boys, but to think that all is roses in that area and in big-iron Unix would be a misconception.
Re:Too small and fragile (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure I can. Just depends on the software load that you put on the system and its overall architecture. Solaris has advantages on some things, but its becoming more and more marginalized by Linux as it moves forward. As far as hardware on Sparc -- in my experience I have seen it crash just as much as Intel. Of course, you say Intel, but what Vendor is producing the materials for the "Intel" system? It requires a little initial fact-finding prior to purchasing the hardware as compared to Solaris/Sparc... since Sun is the only one that spits out those systems.
The software that I'm involved in is Manufacturing Control Systems. Our architectures are quite varied from factory to factory. We've run on Xenix, Interactive Unix, Solaris 7/8, SunOS and Linux. I wasn't with the company with Xenix, but Interactive is a Dog and terrible at filesystem stuff. We used that until Sun bought it and integrated it into SunOS to become Solaris. Then we moved along with it and began using Solaris on Sparc machines. This worked quite well at one factory, except it was a bane trying to train the customer on how to setup the systems.
Then we went to Linux. Linux brought us not only more bang for our buck, but -- on an OS level -- more stability for our buck. Yes, we did purchase copies of RedHat Linux
But, our next system was Solaris/Sparc. This time we used jumpstart and a bunch of nifty things to make it easier for the customer to get it setup. The integration on Solaris/Sparc for these kind of things is quite cool and I hope Linux/Intel can put something similar together. Anyway, we began using NFS in our last architecture and then used the same arch on Solaris/Sparc. Huge Mistake. Don't ever run something worth over 1 billion dollars on NFS/RAID with Solaris. Sorry. The downtime/crashing that occurred with it is way above the norm. It crash 2 or 3 times last year. Horrible on the network performance too because the system may have scaled way beyond Solaris' capacity. (60 Nodes communicating with 1 Node grinds the CPU terribly on Solaris.) I know I don't have the numbers to back these up, my only benchmark is how loudly the customer yells.
Our latest system uses IBM xSeries with dual hard drives in a RAID 1 configuration. Excellent systems. The per computer cost reaches about the same price for Sparc and I would risk to say the hardware stability is there. IBM HDs are extremely reliable and the design of the systems are quite fault-tolerant. Maybe in six months, when
The use for Linux in the Enterprise is here and now. If you cannot envision that, then you'll be left behind, plain and simple. The next stable Linux kernel will make it even more so.
Just my
man vs info (Score:5, Insightful)
I like man. I like man -k . I don't like info much.
A well written man page provides a minimal description of the program/system call/... and provides the information a user/programmer really needs quickly and easily. Do man in a terminal and use "/" to search quickly. Do man in emacs and get the ability to do more with the result. Do man: in konqueror and get more.
Info tends to provide long winded description of this that and t'other, usually completely unindexed, unsearchable and for most of my purposes unusable. Let alone that I now need man for some things, info for other things, html for other things and so on....
Personally I'd rather like to see an xml format that would enable documentation writers to build both html pages (I personally think "info" is obsolete) and man pages at the same time. (That is, with tags like <synopsys>, <see-also> and the like, as well as with tags to mark indexable terms). Ideally it should be possible to generate man pages, a howto, a set of html pages for users all from the same input.
But I'd rather have everything documented in "man" style than any of the rest.
Re:Hot swappable CPU's and memory (Score:5, Insightful)
Support for hotswap CPU/RAM etc. This is tough without hardware vendor support. Getting the info to write the driver (under NDA or whatever) is one thing. Proving the OS can actually cope with a CPU hotswap is another. Without high end hardware for testing, this ain't gonna be real. Solution: force the vendors to make Linux a priority on high end hardware.
Mature LVM. Mature enough that you bet your career on it, like HP/Sun/IBM admins do every day while barely understanding what's really involved. Having multiple competing (diluting?) implementations doesn't help.
>8 way scalability. If I had to pick from amongst my wish list, this would be one of the last. However, it does matter. For credibility, if nothing else. Solution? Hmm. Breakthrough in OS engineering, where the big boys get the scalability they want without compromising the low end. Ain't been done yet. But then, that's where the real opportunity is huh?
Compatibility with some significant percentage of the bazaar third party hardware in the world. Like EMC^2 arrays and the wild world of Fiber Channel. On one hand, Linux can/does thrive quite happily in the edge/cluster/small-database/terminal market. On the other, until you can manage a high end drive array from Linux (no, NFS doesn't count) that is where it's gonna stay. Only market share will make this happen.
Diagnostics that don't suck. Again, low level hardware vendor support required. So you paid extra for that nice ECC memory in your self-built machine. Do you know what would actually happen if a bit went bad? What would you get in the way of diag from the machine? Bet most of you don't know... Not good enough. Solution? See "hotswap" above.
Time. Linux is competing with OSes that are 3 times as old in some cases. PHB instinct is going to shy away from something less mature. Truth is those instincts tend to keep planes in the air, whether it fits your agenda or not. Linux isn't exactly new, but it hasn't really met the test of time yet either. Solution? Patience.
Software issues need fixing. GNU compilers suck. The native compiler on a *nix machine needs to not suck. This is basic. Linux has some real POSIX issues too. Threading only being the most obvious. Solution? Someone with the pragmatism and skill of Linus on the compiler/library side.
Mature advocacy. The way to be an effective Linux geek is to not try to sell it. If it's worthy of your advocacy, it doesn't need it. When opportunities appear, out in the "real world", step up. Otherwise, keep your geek mouth shut. Solution? Look within.
Re:Well of course (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes. The Debian package is considered broken until someone, not necessarily the author of the underlying software, creates a man page. It's not a judgement of the underlying software.
Re:Here's the problem.... (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you misunderstand me... (Score:3, Insightful)
The big controversy was Microsoft moving GDI and other aspects of the windowing system into kernel space, not physical device driver support. I'm talking about initializing the physical device and managing video device registers, blitting, etc. in kernel space, while userspace apps (or better, a general purpose library) use traditional system calls to handle userspace communication to the device. This was hashed out repeatedly long ago (with many flame wars ensuing) on the lkml. Unfortunately it was a good idea that never happened.
Think about it like this: you wouldn't want your IDE device driver running as a deamon with root privs in userspace, would you? So why should your X Server do the same? Why should you have ten different X servers tailored to every popular video card on the market? Have you ever switched from an X session to a virtual terminal only to see your console completely hosed? I can't count the number of times I've seen this and wondered 'Why the fuck hasn't this been fixed yet?!?!?!' XF4.x with its modular device drivers notwithstanding, this is still a serious issue.
Managing hardware recognition, initialization, and physical attributes in kernel space is cleaner than having a bunch of usespace apps doing the same in ways that are almost certainly mutually exclusive. It's supposed to be the kernel's job to handle simultaneous contention for a device between various apps. That was the point behind GGI, and is currently the point behind the Linux kernel Frame Buffer support. Unfortunately, Frame Buffer device drivers are horribly out of date so people just use X instead.
Of course, this is JMO and many people (including Linus at the time) completely disagreed many years back. I, however, think the GGI folks were completely right and wish Linus had given their ideas a better chance at kernel inclusion. OTOH, you don't see my name in the kernel tree and there's a good reason for that: I'm not qualified. So take my opinion with a grain of salt.
Cheers,
--Maynard
Re:so? (Score:3, Insightful)
Good things about "intra-box scalability" include:
Re:binary (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I Got One... (Score:3, Insightful)
I got the $3000 price for the HP Linux Distro from the Slashdot article announcing its availability. That's what I get for believing slashdot, I suppose. ;) (or more likely, HP came out with a free version that did not have the support the $3000 version had.)
As for the pricetag on Solaris x86, well, that's too bad for you. If you run Solaris on SPARC like God intended, it is free to download the iso from the link I so thoughtfully provided. Solaris 8 was free for download for both architectures, IIRC. Sparcs are cheap on Ebay and even several years old desktops are reasonably powerful compared to PCs and can run the latest versions of Solaris with no problems.
I would imagine that Sun is charging a bit for x86 Solaris because they make money on Hardware, though they do sell x86 hardware as well. You will also notice that as of Solaris 9 they have slowed down the x86 development. I was actually surprised to see they went ahead and came out with it after many moons passed while the future of x86 Solaris was left unstated (starting with the announcement that Solaris 9 SPARC was available, but Solaris 9 x86 was not.)
I think also some of this threw off the people who, in stark contrast to the hobbyists x86 Solaris seems to have been meant for, started to buy real x86 servers and throw x86 Solaris on them instead of buying SPARCs. These people are likely the ones Sun would like most to discourage from using x86 Solaris, and from what I can tell the uncertainty factor worked very well for Sun in that regard.
Re:Plenty of commercial features to add (Score:2, Insightful)
Um, you're totally right about how cool devfs is. I'm quite fond of it on Mac OS X. What Solaris does, however, is not at all devfs. devfsadm on Solaris is the devil. Ever have your drives dynamically renumbered out from beneath your vfstab? Try it some time.
Re:Well of course (Score:5, Insightful)
Fourteen months later...
What the fuck is XXX, what does it do, and why did I write it?!?!
Re:Well of course (Score:4, Insightful)
Then you have some idea of what your code is going to have to do...
Problems Win2K has that neither UNIX or Linux have (Score:4, Insightful)
Consider this: the AD DNS zone is required to be in your domain container. This means two major things: ALL DCs in your domain have this information replicated to them (whether they are DNS servers or not) and NONE of your DCs in other domains can host these zones.
Stretch item one out, and you will see that when a user in Japan powers on his workstation, it replicates to my DC here in the states. Do I care to access that guys data SO BAD that his replication storm^H^H^H^H^H event hits my DC? Even though it isn't running DNS? Kinda silly, really.
Taken the other way, if I want a multimaster DNS zone to cross a domain boundary even in the same forest I cannot do it. It simply cannot be done. You could set up a zone transfer and work some mojo, but you lose the benefits cited in your post. Active Directory DNS doesn't support stub zones, either.
Active Directory 1.1 (Windows 2003/Windows .NET Server/Pick one) fixes these complaints with enlistable name spaces that can cross domain boundaries, but just try to get THAT pushed through in a large environment until 3 months after SP1. Not very fscking likely.
I actually find the automagical functionality of AD fascinating, and I do not mean to troll. I just find that most folks who extoll AD haven't seen it with over a couple of thousand clients.
Re:Here is my list (Score:3, Insightful)
Not all of the features of Solaris or AIX or in Linux (yet). My list might be a little outdated since I left tech work back in 2000 but the fud of Mindcraft and the Brown Associates report stated all 7 of the things mentioned above as well as a lack of a journaling filesystem and volume managment tools. Since both of these are now available in Linux its no longer an issue. However real enterprise hotswapable support in SGI and SUN is not available in Linux( yet ). I am talking about replacing cpu's and memory while the system is on. Not raid 5.
In a wharehouse or factory a single reboot and disk check could take literally hours! Especially if a database is installed and needs to check itself for corruption. This is the same kind of environment where the systems must remain 24x7. A crash can cost tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. Infact most fortune 500 companies do not even trust Sun or Unix and still use IBM mainframes.
Hot swapable cpu's and memory is a must because of this for any serious Unix user. No, Linux does not have this. USB, firewire, raid 5, and PMCIA were designed to be hot-swapable hardware. Cpu's and memory modules(x86) are not and even on sun hardware need os support. Intel will bring this out with Itanium and hopefully linux will support it.
Some other things I did not type that Linux is lacking is hardware/software integration and backplane bus's. For certain software apps the pci buss can get oversaturated while Sun boxes run without a hitch. Think terminal server and database.
Yes, you can run linux on sun hardware but all the linux apps besides opensource are only available on intel so the bus issue is important in ERP and database software. People who need them obviously can only use Unix or a mainframe.
Cmd Taco just posted a question on what Linux is lacking compared to Unix and I gave an honest answer. Relax. People who buy Unix need a solution for both hardware/software/support and if they have a certain need like lots of i/o, high availability or hardware then only Solaris and AIX is the answer.
Re:Things Win2K has that nither UNIX or Linux have (Score:3, Insightful)
Not saying I don't believe you, as such... but what improvements put NDS 'light years' ahead of AD?
I'm willing to bet that NDS is more robust, and perhaps a little better designed, but I can't believe 'light years ahead' without some actual information.
Google and Linux Scalability (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Lot's of things you'll never see in what? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Here is my list (Score:5, Insightful)
The poster you're replying to never mentioned Raid 5. He was talking about things like hot-swappable devices from PCI to USB to SCSI. In case you're not aware, RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) is a specification for concatenating disk drives in efficient ways that provide increased data integrity at the cost of storage space. RAID5 is one of the 4 that are commonly used (0, 1, 4 and 5... bonus points if you can tell me where RAID4 is most commonly used). So, while the technologies that the poster was describing might be applied to disks and/or controlers (and often are), that has no bearing on how you structure your storage.
As for "real enterprise"... I don't need or want systems that can hot-swap memory or CPUs. I want systems that do what I want fairly quickly and do a good job of talking to eachother. Everything else is negotiable. If you build your environment correctly, all applications can behave this way.
On to your points....
if [purchasers of hardware/software] have a certain need like lots of i/o, high availability or hardware then only Solaris and AIX is the answer.
Coming from a production environment which has a great deal of need for "lots of i/o", "high availability" and "hardware", I can say that Linux fits the bill very well. I've admined large environments based on Solaris and HP/UX in my life and I can tell you that Linux is not a second-rate platform by any measure. It *is* a product of its upbringing, and you *do* need to keep that in mind to admin it correctly.
For example, Linux supports a huge range of hardware. Some of it is supported poorly, but most of the stuff that you would generally get your hands on is solid. The problem is that while the software is solid, some of that hardware is crap. It's easy to think of Solaris has more stable than Linux when your average Linux installation is running on crap for hardware.
Yes, it's true, there are hardware giants (like Dell and IBM) pushing Linux on solid hardware, and that's good. However, I find the crap-box hardware to be more interesting. It's prices/performance in terms of raw uptime is truly staggering. This is how we build our environments. We buy dozens of dinky little 1us and configure the software so that we can pull any 10 of them out of the mix and no one cares.
I prefer this model, but your milage may vary.
In a wharehouse or factory a single reboot and disk check could take literally hours!
Why was it designed so poorly? I've got several terabytes of disk sitting in the corner, and when I reboot it it comes back in about 96 seconds. Mind you, I don't recommend storing terrabytes of disk on anything that runs a general purpose OS (I use dedicated storage devices for that), but if you are going to be that stupid, Linux is just as good (or better) a choice as the competition.
Especially if a database is installed and needs to check itself for corruption.
I hate to sound like a broken record here, but why was it designed so poorly? My database comes back from a reboot with a quick message about recovering any lost transactions from its log? Are you not using a real database? I don't like Oracle, but you might want to try it out. Works very nicely.
This is the same kind of environment where the systems must remain 24x7
There's no such thing. Ask the folks at AT&T who tried their damndest to build a phone switch that could make that claim. They came close. For millions of dollars you could shave off an extra 9. What did everyone learn? Mostly that in the real world that last 9 you just bought is a rarer problem than some idiot letting a cleaning person into the "super secure data center" with a mob and bucket. Oh well, chalk that up to expensive lessons and don't repeat it.
The point I'm getting at here is two-fold: 1) every major OS is capable supporting produciton environments... it's a matter of how you use them and 2) if you start off with the assumption that product (x) sucks and cannot compete with product (y), you're probably going to find evidence to support your claim... regardless of your local values for (x) and (y).
Good luck!
Re:Here's a few that I could think of... (Score:2, Insightful)
A thing which sucks in Linux is networking. Here I'm talking about drivers and the configuration. I still have to take the time to make shure all interfaces use the right speed and duplex mode. To do this I have to use mii-tool which does't work well with all drivers. My complaint is the lack of conformity among the drivers. Look at the BSD drivers and see how it's done. Second provide a man page for every driver with good documentation especially about bugs and flaws.
The last thing I want to bring forward is the missing mpath daemon. Solaris has a very clever daemon which can group interfaces together to let the OS us more than one NIC on the same network. Thus if a wire/switch/interface fails the daemon automatically moves routes and IP's from one interfcae to the other. NB I'm not talking just about link failure but also the event where packets just gets dropped on the way through the network. I know I can by my way out of the problem but I think it should be a part of Linux.
Generally I believe that Linux needs more consistency. It still feels like a bunch of tools smacked together with a kernel created by thousands of people with different oppinions.
It needs to feel like one OS from the bottom and up.
What High End Linix Features are Missing from Unix (Score:2, Insightful)
The truth is basically GPL will set you free, from beowolf to Sharp Zaurus to a (motorola) mobile phone, to
Actually being non innovative and 2nd best at everything, ubiquitus, and bundling everything, never did Microsoft Windows any harm.
just one thing (Score:1, Insightful)
My list (Score:1, Insightful)
Linux has:
Some of us with real jobs have real system requirements. Downtime might not be an option - not even a quick reboot. Production stops might cost hundreds of dollars per minute. Files stored on the servers might be DOD, DOE, NATO, etc. classified, where C2 or B1 might be required.
Sorry for posting anonymously. I don't want my name associated with that last paragraph.
*Note: I do not consider all commercial UNICES (MacOS X, A/UX, SCO Xenix, etc.) to be in the same class as UNICES such as Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, IRIX, UniCOS, UTS, etc.