David> Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 08:09:18 -0500 From: "Andrew
David> C. Esh" <andrewes@cnt.com>
David> Hardware, and engineers willing to help us port Linux to
David> their platform.
David> Hellooooo...
This is kind of rude, especially since you can't be sure of what I
meant. Do we have to nitpick each other's wording, now?
Maybe what I should have said was "... help us [continue to] port Linux to
their platform." That would have left no doubt that I am already aware
that there *is* a port. The subject of the sentence, and the point of
the whole paragraph, is that I think it would be nice if we got along
with Sun as well as we seem to with Digital.
David> Linux port is already done and has been for
David> some time, we coded circles around SunSoft in the course of
David> one year and we blow away Slowaris and StunOS hands down
David> performance wise according to lmbench. And whatever Sun
David> based platforms don't work yet, don't worry we'll get the
David> hardware, we've been doing fine so far. (it even runs on
David> Sparc based multicomputers such as the Fujitsu AP+)
This seems to say that we "Don't need no steenking Sun Engineers to
help us!" :) If that's the case, fine. I wasn't suggesting we did. The
fact that Sun does not seem to be forthcoming, as Digital is reputed
to be, is merely an illustration of the relationship.
It is my opinion that we do need to be working with Sun as much as
possible, as long as we don't take a back seat to Solaris. The reason
is, Sun is not going to stop selling their hardware over night, so
there will continue to be a large installed base which could be a
potential market for Linux.
We also need the hardware developers to provide us with high-end
platforms upon which Linux can be used for more interesting
applications than simple ISP servers, for example. One such company is
SGI. I'd like nothing better than to have an SGI running Linux,
cranking out movie frames for something like the Toy Story
movie. Considering the CPU needed to render high detail VRML spaces, I
should think we would be past considering the PC to be a reasonable
platform for VRML development. So, Linux needs to be everywhere. (Who
knows something about the BeBox? :)
Maintaining Linux on a number of different platforms is an ongoing
process, which is best served by having current information about the
hardware. I remember the problem we had getting technical information
from Diamond Multimedia, in order to add support for their video cards
to XFree86. Their unwillingness to help us cost both of us time, and
effort, and benefitted no one. Now that they have provided us with
what we needed, we have Viper support, and Diamond is selling their
cards to Linux users. If Sun were to introduce a new box, it would not
be very fun if they pulled a "Diamond" on us, and refused to tell us
any technical information outside of user space. This smacks of the
copyrighted System ROM deal that has until recently kept the Macintosh
to a single point of supply. Thankfully, OpenBoot seems to be an
indication that Sun will never do this.
We don't want to contend with Sun, as long as we want to run on their
hardware. What one person who responded to my first posting pointed
out, is that we should be concentrating on contending with Win NT. It
would be a shame if people were to have to put some money in Bill
Gate's pocket in order to discover that what they really want is
Linux.
David> Check out:
David> http://www.geog.ubc.ca/sparc
Yes, thank you.
Again, remember that everything I am talking about here is all
based on net-say, so it may all be untrue. These opinions are mine, as
well. I don't speak for anyone.
And I think at this time that enough has been said.
-- Andrew C. Esh mailto:andrew_esh@cnt.com http://www.mtn.org/~andrewes - ACE Home Page