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?"
Re:Rock Solid NFS is needed (Score:1, Interesting)
the price tag (Score:5, Interesting)
A better question would be "where is Linux kicking the crap out of Unix?". Now *there* would be a flame fest. Note that I'm a Unix fan, but Linux has surpassed it as a developer's workstation and basic desktop. From the standpoint of an ASIC developer, that is.
JB
Its not easy to remote manage hardware like SUN (Score:4, Interesting)
This is not a high end feature... but a feature critical enough for many corporate organizations to avoid linux.
The other think I love about Sun is the ease of Jumpstart. I always have issues with kickstarts on linux. RH8 doesn't even boot up on Del 1650s leave alone kickstarts. Sun puts a lot of effort in testing. I can't promise anything to my management without first testing it out on linux.... on Sun however, I believe them when they say XYZ version of software runs on SUN Hardware
Its not a big deal... and since both hardware and software belong to sun some would claim that I shouldn't even bring this issue up. But the fact is that these are two good reasons I don't enjoy linux in my corporate network, even though I love and run linux everywhere else possible.
rkt
Re:how about... (Score:5, Interesting)
On the flipside, I'm not sure if using an operating system that's essentially designed to be a clone of UNIX from a user's point of view is the hallmark of the radical thinker.
A workload manager... (Score:5, Interesting)
However, if you manage a single machine with more than one application running from more than one department, you may need to determine the amount of ressources each application can use at minimum and/or maximum. If an application is almost idle, you may need it doesn't lock ressources and let other applications use them with a given priority pattern.
Also, partitionning is not available as far as I know.
LVM (Score:3, Interesting)
I would love to see some standard Logical Volume Managers make into Linux. I believe there are some that are kicking around, but I haven't seen anything getting standardized.
LVMs for the unaware are disk managers that allow such things as filesystems spanning multiple physical devices, dynamic creation and destruction of filesystems, dynamic resizing of filesystems, and other such goodies. AIX's volume management rocks.
lots of stuff.... (Score:5, Interesting)
considering linux vs any general *nix based OS i can think of quite a few places where linux is deficient right now:
* scalability: linux needs to scale to hundreds
of machines and scale well. the NUMA stuff has
gotten into the mainstream 2.5.x kernel so it
should be a good step forward.
* a kick ass scheduler [yes i know ingo's o(1)
patch] is quite important. i still think
linux doesnt have the kind of scheduling
solaris [especially high loads] seems to have
but i will be glad to be proved wrong here.
* VM subsystem: lots and lots of work to be done
here. its been an academic favourite for long
and imho linux VM sucks badly........lots of
work is going into it though
imho not many people who read slashdot know about the linux kernel and OS specific strengths in depth - they tend to jump on the linux bandwagon just for the coolness. i think there are a LOT of issues other than the above where linux is not yet highend. true highend is "big iron" not the
mysql+apache+php webserver projects for which linux seems to be a favourite.
its just that linux is growing. its a long way from maturing imho.
vv
User mode linux? (Score:2, Interesting)
Linux != High End (Score:5, Interesting)
Linux is not an Enterprise level Unix. That isn't its niche. It's an OS for low-mid range hardware.
The argument for Unix versus Windows has been... Unix is expensive hardware with cheap (nearly free software). Windows is the exact opposite, cheap and redundant hardware with expensive software licensing. Trying to license Microsoft SQL can be as onerous as trying to negotiate an Oracle contract.
Are there other things available in Enterprise Linux? Sure, it's called licensed software. Enterprise level companies are extremely leary of deploying software unless it's licensed. They don't want to hear the word "free". "Free" in their minds often means there is noone to sue.
Also with corporate enterprise, there is a sincere fear of employee empowerment. No company wants to be held hostage by their employees. With Linux, the power is within the administrator to have full control over the operating system. Most companies have no way of watching the watchers to this level, especially with knowledgable, disgruntled employees. It's not a sound argument, but it's one that is often tossed out there.
Other more obvious things include mature LVM (logical volume management). Being able to add and grow filesystems on the fly. Active and mature SAN access. The VMM has come a long way from the 2.x kernel, but still needs to play catch-up.
You realize the ideal setup for an AIX 5.x server? You optimize the server (performance wise) for ZERO percent paging space. There are certain tools that come with the operating system at the kernel level you just won't find with Linux unless you're a kernel hacker... Companies don't have the luxury of hiring kernel hackers to administrate their systems.
Re:I Got One... (Score:3, Interesting)
The big one... (Score:1, Interesting)
To have the company spend hours ensuring that their servers will not crash after X hours, x years, x load...
I love Linux. But I know what it's like to be on the bleeding edge of Linux, having to upgrade every other day, every day, sometimes even an hour later, because the release you just got is unstable. Or finding out months later that after two weeks, three weeks, your system corrupts its memory.
Now that's due to the difference in the development cycle of Linux vs Unix. Linux doesn't have a dedicated QA cycle, one that has the money, the equipment, the people, and the DESIRE to verify that kernel xxx will run for 1 year without any issues.
You may think, oh, it's not a big deal to reboot your machine every week or two weeks or a month. But in some cases where unix is used, that downtime is deadly.
Two people I know work for the NRC - Nuclear Regulatory Commission. They write saftey software for nuclear reactors. It runs on various flavors of unix... and probably could easily be ported to Linux. But I doubt it ever would. If you're going to trust the saftey of YOUR nuclear reactor, you want that vendor rep standing behind his product, guaranteeing that server won't crash in the middle of the night. You WANT 24/7 dedicated support for your box, you NEED every single patch to be stress tested for a month or more before you install it.
And that's where Linux will never be able to replace Solaris, etc. Linux will never have the dedicated money, equipment, people, and QA testing certification in place to guarantee that kernel x.x.xx will run for a year.
It's not a bad thing. But there will always be a place for commercial unix distros in mission critical applications.
reset a bus (Score:2, Interesting)
He was able to reset the bus, so that he could troubleshoot a RAID device, without powercycling the entire computer. It was some kind of XIO bus architecture proprietary to SGI systems I think. It was a server, with hundreds of people connecting to it, so it's not like he could powercycle the server anytime he wanted to.
From what I hear, all server class Unix systems have this feature built into their hardware/software.
Where's Linux? Oh yeah.. 99.9% of all Linux installations run on x86 hardware. Go figure.
Re:Here is my list (Score:2, Interesting)
Another problem includes the lack of good documentation. Most of the stuff today gives ample bad documentation. Frequently you get man pages, info pages, and HTML which is vague.
Throw in the lack of standards and certifications and things go bad quick. For example, NFS cannot handle nested mounts. The system is not POSIX compliant (it is close). The main distributions do not run CDE. Only certain parts of Linux have passed any form of accreditation. That combination makes software development somewhat troublesome.
What about the idea of a patch? In Linux, a patch means download the next version of the product. On other systems it does not. Specifically, a patch does not usually change the interface with the subsystem being patched.
Patch a Linux kernel and you must recompile all your modules. Most other operating systems do not require this unless a major revision change occurs.
POSIX 1003.2 features (Score:2, Interesting)
SGI provided a patch to add support for asynchronous I/O using code borrowed largely from Irix, however without any means of notifying a process when an asynchronous request has been completed, asychronous I/O is entirely worthless.
There was a project to add support for realtime signal queues to Linux, but as far as I know it died before reaching completion.
Some other features would include a non-executable user stack. This is present and enabled per default on Solaris for all sparcv9 binaries, and a configurable option for 32-bit binaries as well.
Re:Rock Solid NFS is needed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Its not easy to remote manage hardware like SUN (Score:1, Interesting)
They are on top and charge big money for one reason, investment in automation of testing.
Opensource will NEVER get close to that.
Re:Things Win2K has that nither UNIX or Linux have (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Rock Solid NFS is needed (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't get me wrong, I'm a Linux administrator now, I administer Linux only. We do have NFS servers, but we monitor them, and our machines are fault-tolerant IBM xSeries systems. Err.. well, fault tolerant fan and disk-wise.
Re:Its not easy to remote manage hardware like SUN (Score:2, Interesting)
I disagree. I think the remote management capabilities in linux are just fine. I regularly use kickstart to re-install old boxes and to install brand new ones. (including a bunch of Dell 1650's)
As long as the machine has got a serial port and BIOS support for console redirection, then you don't even need the machine on a network to administrate it remotely. I've got a whole slew of machines that are thousands of miles away from me that I administrate over SSH when the network is available and through a Cyclades serial concentrator when the network is dead......it works great. No third party cards required. And, if you've got remotely controllable power strips (which you should if you're serious about remotely administering any number of servers), then your power needs are taken care of as well!
Administrating my hundreds of linux boxes remotely is just as easy as administrating my Solaris boxes, maybe easier.....ever accidentally send a break over a serial connection to a Solaris box??
Re:Jur-Ass-Has-Had-It-Park! (Score:4, Interesting)
That was a demo "file manager" like app that SGI had included with the original Indigo Elan 4000 machines. I'm not sure what crap they ran it on for the movie though (must've been an Indigo 3000 without the Elan card), as the movie made it look really slow and choppy.
There are similar projects out there for Linux/Unix/X, do a freshmeat search for 3d file manager and you'll probably find several.
Re:Well of course (Score:5, Interesting)
Amen.
I hate info. An unnecessary tool poorly implemented (implemented in the 'practically unusable' sense -- for all I know, the code for info could be excellent).
Okay, now that I've drawn my line in the sand, what differentiates me from everyone else on /.? Why do I hate info?
I pretty much already answered that above. It's an unnecessary tool. There exists no gap between "man page" and "html/pdf/tool of choice for 'real' documentation" that needs to be addressed.
'man' is exactly what you want for immediate access to practically everything (although I wish man -k worked better...) when you're in the middle of completing some task. All you need to know is a couple simple things, like how your pager works, and whether you're getting the bash or the libc man page for something when there's an overlap -- and even that could probably be addressed by adding symbolic names so we can type 'man libc printf' instead of the random 'man 3 printf' so we don't look at printf for the shell. But anyway. They all are arranged the same, and you can zip to what you need in moments; plus, in my experience the man page holds what I needed better than three quarters of the time. 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.
For any documentation need more heavyweight than that, I probably want to be looking at something like javadoc or the python library reference, in my web browser. A web browser is very well suited to navigating hierarchal documentation structures (especially if they use their link tags well!). I have all the tools of mozilla (phoenix, galeon, konqueror, etc.) at my disposal to locate the information I need, and for a serious documentation need, I would rather be reading for two hours on a browser with good (well, better) font support than in an xterm. And for the doc writer, there are lots of tools available (starting with LaTeX, which is totally free) to generate these docs not only as html, but as postscript or pdfs for paper presentation as well.
So for me, it's a one-two punch; I don't see a need in the space the tool addresses, and I find the tool itself to be unwieldy. I'd love to see better man pages, as far as I'm concerned, it has far from outlived its usefulness.
Re:Well of course (Score:3, Interesting)
Two reasons. The first is that Linux has not traditionally been as serious as the BSDs. This has changed, and likely the quality of documentation will improve.
The other is that the FSF seems to prefer info over man. Indeed, info has some significant wins over man (namely hyperlinking). I think the community should consider either adding those features to man (seems possible to me), or going for a standard format like HTML (would be my preference, being an XHTML zealot).
Another thing I wonder is if a typical hobbyist Linux install has exceeded VMS in terms of documentation yet.
---
To use 'to use' to mention 'to mention' is a mistaken use of 'to use', not to mention 'to mention'.
-- Lenny Clapp, philosophy teacher at UCD
Re:Rock Solid NFS is needed (Score:2, Interesting)
Obviously, your situation is completely different. You do things on a professional basis and correct mapping of uids can be arranged. I am but a mere hobbyist, but I do think NFS is flawed.
---
"And don't tell me there isn't one bit of difference between null and space, because that's exactly how much difference there is."
-- Larry Wall
Re:Rock Solid NFS is needed (Score:1, Interesting)
Autofs isn't as cool as Low-Latency kernel patches, so it will never get fixed.
Plenty of commercial features to add (Score:5, Interesting)
Display Postscript: Whatever happened to L. Peter Deutsch's old Display Ghostscript X Server extension? It seems like the last update to that was about three years or so back. Now that's a feature we would all love. DPS handles displaying fonts and complex shapes properly. We all know X isn't going to die any time soon, so a good Display Ghostscript server extension would be a Godsend. For that matter, with all the funding being dumped into KDE and Gnome, why did we all forget about GNUStep? But I digress.
devfs: Please, when are we going to finally transition away from static device nodes to devfs? Solaris had it right, dynamically name the device on detection after its physical properties. This is really important and hasn't been implemented for anything more than testing.
In kernel Framebuffer/DRM device drivers: The old GGI folks had it right. Physical devices like video cards should be initialized and managed in kernel space. Let the console and applications like an X Server talk to the device through a device node and/or ioctl calls and be done with it. No more video crashes when changing display modes, and real user space video security. Yes, there's framebuffer support in 2.4, but not for any decent, modern, cards. DRM hooks within XFree-4.x have come along nicely for GLX support though.
NFS: is STILL a mess! Christ, five years after everyone in Linux land finally accepted that Linux needs a major NFS rewrite and we still have to run BSD or a commercial UNIX for a decent NFS server. What a clusterfuck.
AFS support: OpenAFS is good, real good. But its licensing terms are unacceptable for inclusion into the main kernel tree. AFS is critical for enterprise quality network filesystem support. Notwithstanding, I still thank IBM for their initial code release and the OpenAFS team for the quality work they've done in porting the old IBM/Transarc codebase over to Linux.
Journaled filesystems: are here, but they're still a bit shaky for heavy use. They're getting pretty damn good feature wise though. A year or two more of long uptimes in the real world and they'll be rock solid for the enterprise. Way to go!
Raw I/O support: Primarily due to pushing from Oracle and IBM this has come a long way. But it still needs to be banged on for a couple years yet before enterprise folks will trust Linux for large scale database deployments. We also need a ubiquitous 64 bit platform to deploy upon. Alphas and Suns don't count because not enough folks run Linux on those systems to shake out enough bugs such that one would prefer Linux over DU or Solaris. I've seen Linux on an ES40 and it's not pretty. Which leads me to...
Mainstream 64bit hardware: This is not a Linux fault, but the fault of Intel. When are they going to finally release a decent 64 bit platform suitable for the commodity market? Un-fucking-believable that over ten years after the release of the DEC Alpha we still don't have ubiquitous 64bit computing. And these days RAM is so cheap we're actually running up against the physical memory bus limit, never mind the virtual memory advantages to 64bit memory management. This is just stupid. Hope AMD eats Intel's lunch, they deserve it.
I'm sure there's more... and JMO for what little that's worth.
Cheers,
--Maynard
Re:Rock Solid NFS is needed (Score:3, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Here's the problem.... (Score:1, Interesting)
While we're on that tangent, I think it would be nice to have modular drivers that don't require a kernel recompile. I understand that loadable modules are available, but the kernel must support the module extensions and thus, still needs a recompile.
Of course, to do that, you'd have to revamp the entire driver model and structure of device support.
Still curious as to why there ought to be a separation of Server and Desktop Linux?
How about this: Linux won't matter on 98% of desktops until the above actually happens, and maybe not even then. Every day it stays with its Unix roots is another day that it remains irrelevant to the average user.
Re:Well of course (Score:3, Interesting)
IMHO man wasn't broken (at least, not for "quick access" documentation), and info is certainly not a fix in any event.
-Carter
Re:Well of course (Score:5, Interesting)
EXAMPLES!
Re:Rock Solid NFS is needed (Score:2, Interesting)
The amd config files are on our NIS server, so setting up machines to automount users's home directories is as easy as copying a standard amd.conf file in
Perhaps you could give an example of why you think is sucks.
hooks to enable proper BATCH support. (Score:2, Interesting)
standardized user accounting, groups, and accounts. grouping of processes by job-id (so that you cannot just daemonize your running job, to change your process group, and avoid being killed at job end.) The ability to asssign different scheduling priorities and limits to jobs (not users or accounts.) The limits should include the normal cpu time and memory, but also cpu count, and things like residency time.
Once you have hooks for the above, you will have decent support from various workload managers: NQS, Sun Grid Engine, Platform, PBS, IBM WLM, etc...
Administrator Tools (Score:2, Interesting)
So, where does Linux fall short in that area? Someone once had a good idea for a configuration tool, called "linuxconf" but the problem there was that it attempted to keep its own configuration database, separate from the actual state of the system. If someone modified a directory permission or configuration file by hand (the manly way) and then ran linuxconf, then linuxconf would change it back to what it was.
We need a tool that aspired to be like linuxconf, but stateless, i.e. does not try to keep a separate database of configuration settings.
Perhaps what is needed is a well published interface specification for administration modules (one probably already exists but I don't know about it) for a generalized administration tool. THen, when someone writes a utility or program that has a configuration file, write a configuration specification to go along with it so that the administration tool would know how to make/edit the configuration file.
Of course, sendmail being one of the nastiest creations in existence, would prove that this sort of thing can exist.
Re:Unix on big iron is flakey too under load (Score:2, Interesting)
However, its neighbor with eight CPUs running ASIC simulations (monstrous CPU and memory (therefore disk) usage) crashes regularly and interestingly. Actually, it never really crashes (panics/reboots), but just starts acting wierd. If you stop the simulation, it will usually act a bit better but it usually takes a reboot for normality.
Sun blames the simulator and the simulations are too customized to blame the tool vendor, so we get to figure it out ourselves.
Now that the last chip is mostly done and the machine isn't taxed as hard (still compiles Verilog & does smaller simulations), it never goes down.
Re:A workload manager... (Score:3, Interesting)
It is not possible to do this without strong workload management.
Re:Well of course (Score:5, Interesting)
Undocumented software is basically worthless as far as I'm concerned. Software should be easy enough to use without having to refer to the documentation often, but the documentation should be there in case I need to find something, and quickly.
And you're right, it is restrictive. But if that restrictiveness increases the distribution's quality, so it's fine by me.
AND, if you're in such a hurry to use undocumented crap software, you can always just compile the source code and off you go, who needs a Debian package anyway.
Re:Plenty of commercial features to add (Score:4, Interesting)
What are the differences between Linux and UNIX? (Score:3, Interesting)
has a much larger market appeal and following than any commercial UNIX. GUI-wise there are
also no major differences--Linux, as most other UNICES, uses an X-Windowing system.
The major differences:
- Linux is free, while many UNICES (this is supposed to be plural of UNIX), cost A LOT. Same
about applications--many good applications are available on Linux free. Even the same
commercial application (if you wanted to buy one) typically costs much more for a commercial
UNIX than for Linux.
- Linux runs on many hardware platforms, the commodity Intel-x86/IBM-spec personal
computers being the most prominent. A typical UNIX is proprietary-hardware-bonded (and this
hardware tends to be much more expensive than normal PC).
- With Linux, you are in charge of your computer, whereas on most UNICES you are typically
confined to be an "l-user" (some administrators pronounce it "loser").
- Linux feels very much like DOS/Win in the 80s/early 90s, but is much sturdier and richer, while
a typical UNIX account feels like a mainframe from the 60s/70s.
- Some UNICES may be more mature in certain areas (for example, security, some engineering
applications, better support of cutting-edge hardware). Linux is more for an average Joe who
wants to run his own small server or engineering workstation.
Re:In practice. (Score:2, Interesting)
Nothing is more frustrating than trying to configure a service that has crappy docs, and most causal/R&D users will move on once their BP gets high enough. Sure, if your job depends on it you'll figure it out, but that's not exactly the foundation for a glowing recommendation.
I don't neccessarily need a man page, in fact, man pages are one of my last resorts. My ideal would be an XML doc that could be converted to whatever format I choose, but even a text file and some meaningful config.example files.... it really doesn't matter the format. It's the quality of the information that's key.
Solaris and the SE Toolkit (Score:2, Interesting)
SE Toolkit always seemed to the one of the "don't leave home without it" tools we must have when working on high volume/high capacity Solaris systems.
Can the latest Linux kernels be tweeked at runtime and boottime as much as the internal of Solaris or HPUX or AIX?
amd is dead - autofs is not , yet they both suck (Score:3, Interesting)
everyone says: I use amd and it works for me...
when you happen to find that amd doesn't work for you, you discover the ugly truth that amd is dead and buried and you'll get no developer support.
So, then you look at autofs and find out that it's still alive, but it's constantly in beta and still has a lot of issues.
Automounters have a historical propensity to suck.
Both amd and autofs are a steaming pile compared to Sun's automount (probably because fortune 500 companies have nagged at Sun so much about glaring automounter bugs that they've now fixed most of them and are left with a relatively reasonable implementation).
If you've ever worked somewhere that actually takes advantage of the automounter and pushes it to it's limits as opposed to using it for once in a while file access from the commandline, you're already painfully aware how feeble the linux automounter options are and how woefully inadequate their documentation is.
Re:Here's the problem.... (Score:3, Interesting)
For servers, I'm using a RH based system for a, brace yourself, beowulf cluster. Just install the necessary RPMS (which, btw, tend to install faster than Windows programs, and you don't even need to reboot your computer multiple times), edit some config files and learn how to use MPI, and your set. We also have SSH, web server, mysql, etc. on there, and there hasn't been a hitch (well, except for some hardware problems, but that's what you get when using Compaq's with 5+ year old hard drives...)
What's Missing and What's NOT (Score:4, Interesting)
1. Robust Journaled, Clustered filesystem supporting multiple concurrent mounts by seperate machines, with ACL and Quota Support, extensible by NFS V4 or other IP implementation, without giving up ACL's and Quotas in the process of networking it. That doesn't cost the firstborn's of all my staff, pluss arms, legs, and other vital parts of our anatomy.
GFS is close...but not there yet.
GPFS is closer, but has it's own API hooks that make it painful for some apps, and costs as described above.
CXFS hasn't been ported to Linux yet.
etc.
2. A quota management suite that stores quotas limits in a highly flexible SQL DB and applies them to the running system quotafiles via a cron job. Right now, lose or corrupt the quotafile, lose your settings...or restore from backup and wait while you update quotas on a filesystem with 16M files.
3. Access Database read/write access. Not strictly necessary, but would make that last-bit of selling SOOOOO much easier.
4. Games - never play them myself, but can't count the number of people who tell me they would move in a heartbeat for their home machine if only the games were there.
NOT missing
1. Large System Support
Got one with 1.8TB of user data files, 36,000 user home directories, and 16M+ files.
BTW, EXT3 is quite stable, thank you. Thanks in part to one of my staff who beats it to death finding problems with ACL, Quota, Ext3, etc under heavy load and SMP.
2. Performance - wind it up and watch it go...
Our mainframe thinks its a big day when they do 180,000 transactions in a day. Our network servers think its a holiday and everyones at home.
3. Full Commercial Support - GEEEZZZZ I get sick of this one. Of course it has full vendor commercial support. Pay as much to Oracle, RedHat, Dell, IBM, Consultant of your choice, etc. to support it as you do for a support contract for one of those overpriced OS's of yesteryear, and they'll happily support any damned thing you want!
Or, take the view I cultivate. Be your own support. It's cheaper to hire a couple of kick-ass programmers, and 3-4 hot young sysadmins, than it is to pay full support for scads of OS's and Applications!.
What Linux is missing - (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Hot swappable CPU's and memory (Score:3, Interesting)
It seems pretty obvious that x86 was never meant for enterprise UNIX.
Re:Well of course (Score:5, Interesting)
What the other UNIXes -- Solaris, Irix, MacOS X, etc. -- have is dedicated programmers who are paid to pour over the code to create improvements and nice custom little routines to make it all run nice.
Strongly disagree here. For years, as I became a guru-who-knew-all-the-UNIX-variants (from Interactive 386/ix to Xenix to System V/386 v3.2.3 to SVR4 to Texas Instruments to Bull to Motorola SysV/68 and SysV/88 to DG/UX R5.4.x...and many more) I came to be painfully aware of the commonalities between them.
'awk' as released by AT&T was carried forth, for many generations of UNIX versions, and every vendor of every variant invariably failed to fix any of the common bugs.
I applauded the arrival of 'nawk', where you could put as many comments as you wished in an AWK script without 'awk' crashing. And, as I've implied, this was the case on every UNIX I used.
At least my shell scripts were "portable". Bugs on one platform were bugs everywhere.
Those UNIXes also are written to work on specific hardware.
Now here you (and others before you in this thread) have hit the nail on the head.
From IRIX to DG/UX to AIX to Dynix (well, ok, let's skip Dynix, that's another soapbox), the vendors turned out an absolutely marvelous level of hardware control.
I was able to, on an NCR 4550 (12 processors) detect when a failed processor board (paired CPU's) had been "dead-LEDed" and taken out of service. With a 50-line C program.
On DG/UX, the logical volume manager - a system interface to not software RAID but to actual RAID hardware (c/o CLARiiON, thank you very much) is still unmatched by any other implementation I've seen. Amazing.
I'd submit that OS vendors know (read: think they know) where the money lies: in the synergy between OS and hardware.
<rant>
Almost any UNIX variant, when installed on some other vendor's hardware, would be no more than regurgitated AT&T SVR4.
Many, if not most, of these variants no longer exist. I'm among the last of the dying breed of those who can claim to have lived through them all - and made them work, despite, not because of, vendor practices :-)
</end rant>
Thanks for letting me vent :-)
A Hi-Res Clock (Score:2, Interesting)
Various Unices have avoided this feature for so long, which is regrettable because it is so useful for realtime processing. Anyone who has written a real-time timing loop for a Unix box knows how much that faking it sucks, and how much the real thing is needed.
Backup infrastructure (Score:2, Interesting)
Granted, it's a total niche market, HP, sun, IBM, and Microsoft will continue to get their feet in the door at every company that backs up a lot of data--or uses SANs--because linux is years behind in that department (we've had our Surestore 6/60 libraries for 3 years now).
Re:Well of course (Score:2, Interesting)
Contribute an example today...
Sean
Re:Here's a few that I could think of... (Score:3, Interesting)