Thursday, July 19th, 2007
MBM: Sick of the Solaris FUD train on Linux scalability? DaveM has some thoughts…
I noticed Dave Miller is getting a little sick of the Solaris FUD about Linux. Unforunately, Dave does not seem to have figured out permalinks yet so you have to actually scroll way down the page to get to his two posts “Solaris scalability…” and “The Solaris FUD machine continues…” (update: I was pointed to the direct URL below)
http://vger.kernel.org/~davem/cgi-bin/blog.cgi/2007/04/10#bonwick_scalability
Some choice quotes from Dave regarding Sun’s FUD that Linux “doesn’t scale” are below. I’d also add that over 77% of the world’s largest scaling supercomputers now run Linux – not Solaris. Topping that is the fact that 8 out of the 9 systems SUN places in the Top500 (look at NEC/Sun too) run Linux and you can see which platform Sun chooses for scalability! Anyway, back to Dave:
Last time I checked, Linux scales the crap out of Solaris. Regretfully, Solaris cannot make use of the advanced SMP scaling techniques Linux has such as RCU locking, but that disappointment is no reason to spread the FUD around like this.
The one thing everyone knows for sure is that the only real consequence of Sun openning up Solaris is that now the entire world gets to watch how glacial Solaris development is compared to Linux and how miniscule the community behind Solaris is.
What you have to understand is that they aren’t specifying how large this new machine is, but since we know that they’ve been running Linux on 1024 cpu machines for quite some time at SGI you can be sure this machine is likely enormous. And here’s the punch line, Solaris has never even run on a 1024 cpu system let alone one as big this new SGI system, and Linux has handled it just fine for years.
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September 6th, 2008 at 3:01 pm
Michael Fremlins said:
I think Linux is very overrated. What has it done which is truly new? It copies (in function) UNIX. It copies (in function) Windows. What has it actually done which is new and innovative?
September 6th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
md said:
Let’s start with virtualization where Linux has lead all OSs except for zOS. Then think about Linux being architected to run on everything from nearly all supercomputers to servers laptops mobile phones and embedded devices. Then also consider it supports more processor architectures and devices than any OS even aspires to. Now Linux even leads in security models that offer flexibility and even can bring a real time kernel to a commodity OS. Now think of all the limitations in Unix and I think it’s quite clear.
October 11th, 2008 at 6:09 pm
Michael Fremlins said:
You still haven’t answered my question. What has Linux done which is NEW? Virtualisation has been done before. Running on differrent architectures has been done before. Crikey, all this existed before Linux even existed.
So what has Linux done which is NEW? Name something that has not been done before elsewhere and copied onto the Linux stack. Something that Linux has “invented” for want of a better word.
January 30th, 2010 at 5:22 pm
vorker said:
@Michael Fremlins
Stop playing in straw man. There are many things NEW in Linux like RCU, dozens of improvements in many areas like memory fragmentation avoidance, security models etc. Just look at lwf page and find out.