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The individual owning this blog works for Oracle in Germany. The opinions expressed here are his own, are not necessarily reviewed in advance by anyone but the individual author, and neither Oracle nor any other party necessarily agrees with them.
Innovation and Linux
Friday, September 28. 2007
I wrote several times in this blog, that the innovations of Linux aren't technical ones. Linux is a social phenomenon, not a technical one. Now, Paul Murphy wrote a similar opinion in his blog at zdnet: Is Linux innovative?. From my view, Linux on x86 is the triumph of good-enough. It's good enough to be a webserver, it's good enough to be a mailserver, it's good enough for being a datacenter server. It's not really good at it, but it's capable to run 80% of all unixoid tasks sufficiently when you ignore some problems (like RAS being an afterthought in x86 or the inherent problems of storing data on rotating rust)
The marketing problem: Linux get a good market share in areas with the general suspicion of "beeing innovative" like HPC. Fanboys and media digest this image without further thinking and tout it into the world. The problem: The reality isn't so simple. In HPC Linux is little more than a glorified bootloader and device driver for small nodes (the ability to scale on such cluster has nothing to do with the Linux kernel, it's the merit of the application programming frameworks and fast network (like IB) )
PS: This paragraph made my day
....
The marketing problem: Linux get a good market share in areas with the general suspicion of "beeing innovative" like HPC. Fanboys and media digest this image without further thinking and tout it into the world. The problem: The reality isn't so simple. In HPC Linux is little more than a glorified bootloader and device driver for small nodes (the ability to scale on such cluster has nothing to do with the Linux kernel, it's the merit of the application programming frameworks and fast network (like IB) )
PS: This paragraph made my day
.... Similarly people will argue that Linux scales better than anything else. Theyll point, for example, at SGIs Linux super computers - but those arent SMP machines, theyre multi-processor grids in boxes; and, by that logic the world CPU scaling crown would have to go to Microsoft: for botnet, a wanabe grid entirely enabled by Microsoft Windows.
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This paragraph is just bullsh*t: No grid has a single operating system image, but SGIs supercomputers have.
Obviously the technical statement is incorrect. Interestingly the performance characteristics of an altix is more like grid than like SMP (the scalability is non-linear by a wide margin, when communication has to be done outside of the brick)
As long as you haven't done the scalability benchmark I pointed you to more than a year ago, please just shut up.
1. You didnīt explained to me, why this microbenchmark is of any relevance for scalability besides of your "experience". This benchmark looks at a very limited point of an operating system and as far as i looked on it itīs limited to the network stack. Nobody disputes, that Linux is a fast operating environment, ths point was itīs innovativeness
2. When you want the data, do the benchmark on your own ...
3. The scalability issue of the altix isnīt a problem of Linux. Itīs well documented on several occassion, that the system scales almost linear with tasks that doesnīt communicate between the nodes. But with benchmarks that need to access the memory in other bricks or with communication outside the brick the scaleability suffers.
This issues are inherent to any NUMA-system, especially when you use external interconnects considerably slower than a on-chip crossbar or an inbox crossbar. Any operating system would "suffer" from this. No offence here. From my point of view one of the reasons why sgi does really good in HPC, but is effectivly absent in commercial computing.
2. When you want the data, do the benchmark on your own ...
3. The scalability issue of the altix isnīt a problem of Linux. Itīs well documented on several occassion, that the system scales almost linear with tasks that doesnīt communicate between the nodes. But with benchmarks that need to access the memory in other bricks or with communication outside the brick the scaleability suffers.
This issues are inherent to any NUMA-system, especially when you use external interconnects considerably slower than a on-chip crossbar or an inbox crossbar. Any operating system would "suffer" from this. No offence here. From my point of view one of the reasons why sgi does really good in HPC, but is effectivly absent in commercial computing.
I have to agree. In my opinion community projects are fine to do "small" things like GUI Design and drivers. GUI design may be handled better by community projects than by "bigger companies", as the enduser-contact is better in communities, but complex innovations are mostly coming from "outside" of Linux, for example all the file systems: xfs, zfs, jfs, ...
Without that Linux would still run on ext3 and/or maybe on some ReiserFS, but there are constant rumors in the message boards, that it is unstable...
Next example: In the near future Sun is implementing a new transaction based memory technique. It looks like it has been developed for around 10 years (at least the first papers are 10 years old, but I am not sure if the people had worked on that specific problem all the time
.
No offense to Linux, I like it, too, but for me it is evident, that complex changes cannot be done by the community.
just my 2c
Alex
Without that Linux would still run on ext3 and/or maybe on some ReiserFS, but there are constant rumors in the message boards, that it is unstable...
Next example: In the near future Sun is implementing a new transaction based memory technique. It looks like it has been developed for around 10 years (at least the first papers are 10 years old, but I am not sure if the people had worked on that specific problem all the time
.No offense to Linux, I like it, too, but for me it is evident, that complex changes cannot be done by the community.
just my 2c
Alex
+1
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