Venting my frustration with FreeBSD

[Josh Paetzel]

On Tuesday 05 December 2006 16:36, John Baldwin wrote:
> On Tuesday 05 December 2006 17:06, Josh Paetzel wrote:
> > On Tuesday 05 December 2006 15:36, pete wright wrote:
> > > On 12/5/06, Josh Paetzel <josh at tcbug.org> wrote:
> > > > On Tuesday 05 December 2006 11:19, Nick Hibma wrote:
> > > > > > 1)  SMP scalability.  4-way boxes are relatively common,
> > > > > > and hardware with higher CPU counts is only going to get
> > > > > > more and more common. I'm no industry expert, but 5 years
> > > > > > from now will my clients be considering buying 32 and 64
> > > > > > way boxes? Possibly. Will FreeBSD be in a positiion to
> > > > > > compete favorably vs. the alternatives on such hardware?
> > > > >
> > > > > People have been working on this for years. It's a
> > > > > difficult thing to get right. Sun has been spending a *LOT*
> > > > > of time doing this for Solaris, and I bet that even Linux
> > > > > isn't there yet.
> > > >
> > > > Linux actually scales very well in this area.  My friends in
> > > > the supercomputer business tell me that people are
> > > > successfully using linux on 1024-way SSI boxes.  It doesn't
> > > > scale quite as well as IRIX, but a lot of people opt for
> > > > linux anyways.
> > > >
> > > > For instance, NASA Columbia, which is a cluster of 20 512-way
> > > > SSI Altix's is successfully running linux, and comes in #8 on
> > > > top500.org's supercomputer list.
> > >
> > > yea, i'm pretty familiar with those systems and i would have to
> > > say that the Altix is indeed quite impressive.  but, i would
> > > not equate the ability for SGI to implement a large SSI cluster
> > > like this to a "normal" user being able to implement a similar
> > > setup with a stock linus kernel or stock distro for that
> > > matter....
> > >
> > > -pete
> >
> > What sort of 'normal' user has access to that kind of hardware?
> >
> > Of course they aren't running a stock kernel or distro, but
> > neither are a lot of the guys using linux on real-time embedded
> > hardware. Google doesn't run a stock kernel or distro either, and
> > Verio and Yahoo don't run stock FreeBSD distributions or kernels
> > either.
>
> I would wager that Yahoo's FreeBSD kernel is a lot more stock than
> the Altix one for Linux though.  I think the poster's point is that
> you aren't going to get an OTS OS to run on a 512-way cluster, and
> that if one had time and hardware one could probably hack FreeBSD
> up a bunch to run on a 512-way system just as SGI hacked up Linux.

Not to be pedantic, but the 512 way systems I mentioned are SSI boxes, 
not clusters.  Granted I did mention a cluster of SSI boxes....

But yes, your point is taken.  My point is no one has bothered (AFAIK) 
to do the needed work to FBSD.

-- 
Thanks,

Josh Paetzel