[Beowulf] Rackable / SGI

[Tim Cutts]

On 3 Apr 2009, at 11:11 pm, Mark Hahn wrote:

>> involved with Linux, and open source things such as XFS we would not
>> have the enterprise-level features that we see now.
>
> unclear in several ways.  for instance, linux has hotplug cpu
> and memory support, but I really think this is dubious, since  
> there's damn little hardware that supports it, _anywhere_.
> it's more of a "bank" feature rather than merely gold-plated  
> "enterprise".

We should all be able to use it in a couple of months, in the  
virtualisation world.  The next release of VMware infrastructure is  
going to support hot adding and removal of CPUs and memory to its  
virtual machines.

> XFS may have been fairly "enterprise" for its time - it's been  
> available for linux for quite a while, I think.  but if you look
> at options today, is it clearly the only "enterprise" choice?
> certainly not - ext3 and 4 are certainly viable, though perhaps not  
> in every possible application.  JFS is presumably also an example of  
> big-corp contributed "enterprise" software, but I'd say has had even  
> less of an effect.  dare I mention advfs, which has now been open- 
> sourced?

Too late, unfortunately.  If HP has actually open-sourced AdvFS years  
ago, when they announced the discontinuation of Tru64, things would  
have been a lot better for us.  But we've taken the hit now, and  
copied all our data of it, so we don't care any more.

> from my position, XFS was a semi-fringe option for people who  
> distrusted ext3 for some reason.  (and there were a few solid ones,  
> mainly just >8TB.)  going forward, I expect to use ext4
> and probably btrfs; I don't see a lasting impact of XFS.

btrfs does indeed look good.  I'll continue to mainly use XFS until  
brfs gets here.

> if IBM did buy Sun and made an effort to get ZFS Linux-ized
> (Linus-ized), it would be interesting.  especially if they also did  
> so with Lustre.

Er, in what way is Lustre not already 'Linuxised'?  It's a standard  
part of Debian Lenny, for example.

Regards,

Tim


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