Re: help offered

[ariel@oz.engr.sgi.com (Ariel Faigon)]

:
:First my apologies for asking questions you all know the answer to:
:What kind of SGI-machines does Linux currently work on?
:
Only Indys.


:In what areas does IRIX6.5 have a significant edge over Linux
:performancewise?
:
	- Scalability: up to 256 CPUs
	- Guaranteed Real Time response (kernel is preemptible
	  i.e. you can have multiple system calls executing in server
	  space simultaneously.
	- A real journalling filesystem (XFS). Reboot doesn't
	  require a lenghty 'fsck'.  Even if you have a terabyte
	  filesystem the filesystem check takes one second or so.
	- Bandwidth (I/O networking) e.g. 4 GB/sec write to
	  RAID disks.

Linux has a clear edge is latency (as opposed to bandwidth)
short system call paths, simplicity and a general speed advantage
almost accros the board on machines with a single CPU, small disks,
small files etc.

Note that Linux doesn't even support big files (more than 4 GB)
on x86, while IRIX supports many terabyte files.


:We really want to put Linux on _everything_ we've got, from PI's to
:O2000 (we might also keep a PowerSeries380 for fun), as well as on suns
:and pcs. It would make everything a lot simpler to administrate, plus if
:we're not happy we can try to hack something.
:
Me too. This is not easy to do.  It is a big work.

:If necessary for performance, we can keep IRIX on the numbercrunchers,
:and, if that's not a performance problem, use gcc/egcs and glibc. Same
:questions for these contra Irix Development Kit as above.
:
:I have my employer's blessing to put time into porting and/or
:development of Linux/gcc/glibc for SGI-machines if someone just points
:me in the right direction.
:I have solid programming experience, I have dabbled a bit in sysadmin
:and am a quick learner (I have at times written useful code in unknown
:languages from examples), but haven't been this deep in before.
:
If you could make 'glibc' run on IRIX and send me the details
of what you did (and patches to the maintainers) that would be
a great great thing.  It will make most freeware programs more
portable between IRIX and Linux.

-- 
Peace, Ariel