On Wednesday 21 November 2001 10:40, Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom wrote: > > I can't tell you how happy I'll be when I can get rid of the SGI O2's > > and Origin's in the IMA! > > just leave them on a certain loading dock at a certain time of the early > morning, and I'm sure it can be arranged that you don't see them again. :) > > as for Irix, after playing with it for a few hours, my thoughts so far are: > > pro: > - scales *really* well. (the aforementioned 1024-processor box...) > - has some decent idiot tools for administration > - has really amazing graphics stuff built on top of it > - 'inst' actually looks like a halfway decent package manager. > - has a Logical Volume Manager (no idea how it compares to linux LVM) > > con: > - security is a secondary concern. the fact that system accounts are > shipped by default with no password, just means that it's intended for > knowlegeable administrators who change all these things before installing > the machine on the network. the fact that when you create accounts (at > least with the GUI tool), the default is to make them passwordless (no > password needed to access), is awfully dubious. does TrustedIRIX do this > differently by default? also, it doesn't ship with SSH. I agree with this statement to a point. Security is alwasy a concern for any company. Having open accounts after install I think is pretty insane myslef. In the whole password area IRIX is really lacking. Just the pure fact that IRIX is still using crypt passwords and not MD5 is behond me. The whole ssh thing is a bit convoluted. Because we deal so much with government, ssh has to be an afterthought. IRIX may never include ssh by default, but ya never know. > - user command line tools are horribly neglected. AFAIK, no shell that it > ships with, has command completion (certainly not by default). decisions > like this are what has given UNIX and the command-line a bad name. the GNU > command-line utils blow these (and any other commercial UNIX's) out of the > water. /bin/tcsh Command line completion. BTW, you can get bash from freeware.sgi.com :-) > - filesystem standard, like most commercial unices (unixii?), has grown > organically over the years, and is not well-organized. IMHO, Irix's layout > is cruftier than most. ideas like '/usr/freeware' and '/usr/people/' are > just wrong. one of the things that I *really* liked about linux when I > first saw it; was how reasonably-organized the filesystem layout was. There is a logical reason for home directories being in /usr/people, that is the fact you are better off having an nfs mounted filesystem in a sub directorie than in a root location. So if /usr/people becomes unavaliable, you won't have trouble access / If I were to have the filesystem mounted as /people , and the nfs server for /people went down, I will have timeouts and slow access the / partition. I agree that some tools are in very strange places. Why ping is kept in /usr/etc/ I will never know. There is also a good reason for having freeware put in /usr/freeware. SGI has some tools that can't be replaced by freeware version. Perl is the best example. If you were to replace SGI's perl with the one from freeware, then things like nsd would not work. BTW, there is a script in /usr/freeware/bin called "fixpath" that will add /usr/freeware/bin to your local path. > - a simple installation of it, takes up nearly 800MB. that's GUI, > compiler, and a lot of user tools. And how is that any larger than a default linux install? My last base redhat workstation install was over a gig. You have a few options when doing the install that will make it smaller, there is install default, install standard, install required. All different sizes > - (more of a hardware issue) that fancy graphics hardware does *so much* > in hardware, that flexibility is compromised. a single graphics 'pipe' > (which may be multiple monitors) is limited to 8 million pixels in its > framebuffer; and no more than 3840 pixels in any one direction (horizontal > or vertical). my desktop at home is wider than that (4320 pixels); and IBM > now has a single monitor that requires a graphics card capable of 9.2 > million pixels. If you are refering to the demo you had at the sgi office, the system you were looking at was over 4 years old. I think a better undrstanding of how graphics hardware works would be a good class to take. How you can even compare a single nvidia card to an onyx 3000 is behond me. Here is some better information for you. Lets see, you can hang up to 6 monitors off of a single pipe, have tools like ircombine to put them together and have functional multipal monitors. Time to flip on Mr. Coffee and do some research. http://www.sgi.com/realitycenter/ > > I know my biases show here (certainly based on the quantity of cons vs. > pros); but I would like to say that I don't see anything fundamentally > *wrong* with the Irix kernel itself (at least not yet); it's just that the > tools associated with it, require much more effort to get work done, than > the tools usually associated with the Linux kernel. How do you compare a kernel with userland tools. let's not even get into who's kern is better. When linux has things like systune, sar by default, pcp and a simple kernel recompile (on IRIX all you need to do is autoconfig -vf and you have your new kernel). > > also, I'd like to point out that whatever the shortcomings of the OS are; > the hardware is *really kickass*. I've got an Indigo2 on the desk at work > next to me; and even though it was built in 1993, it blows away most boxes > I ever touched all the way up to 1999. having seen the 1024-processor > Origin in SGI's basement (thanks guys!); I'm truly amazed at it. > > I think that possibly by Linux 2.6, we may be able to boot Linux on 1024 > processors. I doubt that it will scale as well as Irix tho. maybe by the > next stable release, we'll have something that comes close, tho. (I think > HP's pluggable scheduler technology for Linux will make this a lot easier). > > of course, by that time (~4 years at the current pace of things) we'll be > able to build a 1024-proc box in our basements, with off-the-shelf PC > technology (see the recent slashdot article on high-speed interconnect > technology). :) > > Carl Soderstrom I'm not trying to be flame bate here, but I think for a real comparison, a person needs good experience on both linux and IRIX. And seeing that I do support for SGI, and have a long history with linux, I think my opinons on this subject hold a bit more water. I don't think that linux will ever be able to touch IRIX in its stability and scailability, but linux has many things that IRIX does not. IRIX has lost in the UNIX desktop wars, but as a highend server and visulation platform, you can't touch it. For that reason, many of the very cool tools are on freeware.sgi.com and not kept as part of the main release. (please checkout some of the apps that came with your box like moviemaker. videoscope, soundeditor, SGI Meeting, and also the documentation (ivv at the command line). ) is wonderfull. Sorry for being such a ass about much of this, I just get tired of the uneducated trying to educate the uneducated. If you don't know something, than just admit it. I admit there are many linux things that I'm not very up on and some IRIX things that I am rusty at. (Notice how I did not comment on the xlv question). But to compare something that you have tinkered with to something that you have deicated your life to is just not a fair comparison. I wish IRIX had many things that linux has. For example you can't do NAT with IRIX, pam support would be great, full support of NIS and shadow passwords.ssh included in the system. Better security. Updated sendmail. Anything but 4Dwm as a default window manager. I will now step off of my soap box. Jeremy Shawley jshawley at sgi.com SGI Customer Support