Whoa since when is Red Hat not free?

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Excerpts from the article
> Linux Weekly News has just published one of the most interesting
> analysis pieces on Linux that I've seen in ages. In it, LWN executive
> editor Jonathan Corbet addresses the common misconception that
> Linux, and other major open-source projects, are maintained by volunteers.

Read on .... Who really writes Linux?

The article also says that 32.7% of the changes could have come from unpaid volunteers. 1/3 is a pretty big percentage, especially when you note that the largest contributer only accounted for 12.8% on their own. And I'm sure he uses the phrase "may have" for a reason, it's very difficult to tell with 100% certainty that a specific patch was written because a company paid the person to write it. It's very possible that someone gets paid to work on part Y of the kernel and still occasionally works on part Z in their free time. And it's also possible that someone posts patches via a generic Google, Yahoo, etc address even though they're working on a specific company's dollar.

Also as drag points out Linux != OSS. It just happens to be one of the most prominent projects.

And, if nothing else, the major areas of improvement for the Linux kernel lately have to a great extent been stuff that your average garage geek wouldn't care about, other than as a "fun thing" anyway, and in some cases wouldn't be able to develop at all simply because they wouldn't have hardware to test it on.
Companies like IBM, who would love to sell you a $100,000+ box to run Linux on, on the other hand...

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: Sunner

And, if nothing else, the major areas of improvement for the Linux kernel lately have to a great extent been stuff that your average garage geek wouldn't care about, other than as a "fun thing" anyway, and in some cases wouldn't be able to develop at all simply because they wouldn't have hardware to test it on.
Companies like IBM, who would love to sell you a $100,000+ box to run Linux on, on the other hand...

100,000 dollar hardware? Try multi-million dollar hardware.

Like the recent scalability problem faced by the Linux kernel when SGI threw 4096 proccessors in a single system image at Linux.

On my dual cpu machine I have 6 proccesses that are unique to each core. On a massive machine like what SGI is mucking around with that would mean (taking other I/O hardware into account) close to 30,000 proccesses spawned just to boot the machine up.

The first limit was reached when they hit 32,768 proccesses, which is the default limit in the kernel for the number of threads it will handle. So SGI raised the limit.

The next limit was reached in a couple ways. The kernel keeps track of proccesses in a linked-link fasion. With a gigantic number of proccesses like that then it can take a LONG time for the kernel to find a paticular proccess.

Then the second way was when you tried to load a module. When you load a module the Linux kernel sends a high priority thread to every single cpu telling them to basicly halt till so that it can link the module up. The whole machine just locks up simply because it takes soo long just to deal with all 4096 proccessors.

To deal with that, of course, you just compile the drivers into the kernel so you don't have to load modules. The kernel developers came up with a few solutiosn though to deal with these problems in a more constructive matter, of course.

If your curious the system is a bunch of blade servers effectively welded together with special interconnects so you have unified memory address space. All the blade servers run under a single copy of Suse Enterprise Linux 10.

4096 processors, 17TB of RAM, and 330TB of disk space.

This is pretty good considering Linux 2.4 wouldn't scale past 8 proccessors, maybe 16 if you got lucky.

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: drag

Originally posted by: Sunner

And, if nothing else, the major areas of improvement for the Linux kernel lately have to a great extent been stuff that your average garage geek wouldn't care about, other than as a "fun thing" anyway, and in some cases wouldn't be able to develop at all simply because they wouldn't have hardware to test it on.
Companies like IBM, who would love to sell you a $100,000+ box to run Linux on, on the other hand...

100,000 dollar hardware? Try multi-million dollar hardware.

Please take note of the "+" after the number
Trust me, sitting at one of HP's data centers puts you in contact with some pretty big iron, including some running Linux, though I don't mess with the latter directly