Oracle Layoffs Hit Longtime Solaris Developers Hard

[Guest]

That was just some sarcasm aimed at him, whose post indicated that he believed that 9/11 was a controlled demolition and the Al-Quaeda thing was just a "theory".

Everybody sane knows it was controlled demolition, but don't pollute this thread with your bullshit. Everyone also knows jews did it. Furthermore, two towers, two planes and 100% success! Perfect demolition. I wonder why controlled demolition experts didn't go this way? However, it's not mossad's propaganda thread, so shut up.

[coder]

I disagree with this assessment of IRIX. Look and feel had nothing to do with why SGI ran into problems.

I know a few people who worked there and had a different take on things. Regardless, with the benefit of hindsight, it's not obvious what could've saved them. MIPS was already falling behind the competition, when they dumped it. In retrospect, it seems like a good call. Imagination Technologies' attempt to resurrect it ended up being a costly mistake that they could ill-afford.

Perhaps they could've kept IRIX going for a while longer, but it would've eventually been crowded out by Linux.

I don't know too much about their last few generations of custom graphics hardware, but given the amount of talent at other big GPU makers (3dFX, ArtX, etc.) that came out of SGI, you'd think they could've dominated this space if they'd committed to it and targeted 3D hardware at the mass market at competitive prices. Perhaps they could've spun off a subsidiary that would eventually have turned into what Nvidia is now. It's a little surprising their work on the Nintendo 64 didn't lead them in this direction.

There were other markets I think they could've had, like capturing some of Avid and Pinnacle's desktop video seats (and perhaps gaining some more workgroup server installs, in the process). And a friend was keen to point out that SGI could've seriously captured some of the web server market that Sun basically owned around 2000.

[linuxgeex]

Case in point... a friggin stripped down kernel doesn't even fit on a floppy anymore. And Linux doesn't do that much more than it did back then... Linux is by design accretive. Linus has even taken note of the decrease in performance and bloat over time... hopefully at some point he says it's time for a clean slate. You certainly can't call Linux minimal anymore... it's been infected with GNUitis. Back around Linux 2.0-2.4 you could fit an entire basic distro on a floppy... 2.2 based distros were even small enough to bundle in an Xserver.

Indeed, I can remember making a linux floppy with enough initrd to load console DOSEmu with a nice selection of linux and DOS binaries as a swiss-army-knife, and so I could have DOS with 622K of base RAM even with CDROM drivers, EMM and XMS available, and I wasn't even using a compressed initrd, but it was using UPX :-)

But to say linux doesn't do a lot more now than then... bzzt. those tiny builds had minix filesystems because EXT2's overhead would eat the floppy for lunch. Now we have EXT4 and the journal alone is larger than the floppy. We have vastly better TCP these days. We have vastly better error handling all through the kernel and that expands it significantly. We have dynamic SMP support. We have modesetting and DRM drivers whereas the old kernels were using the BIOS to set up VGA/EGA/CGA video modes and poking display memory instead of driving the hardware itself. We have a USB stack. We have a boatload of generic USB device drivers. Would you like to be able to use your keyboard, mouse, thumbdrive, wifi dongle, camera? We take those for granted these days. They were a freaking miracle if they worked at all in 2.2. Even keyboard support was iffy.

And guess what? We have 4G of ram instead of 4M, and our storage is 2TB not 2MB. So stop pointlessly whining about "bloat". We have features. Features take space. You can pare it down a lot if you delete the documentation and replace the high-color binary data with B&W. If you aren't prepared to do that, then guess what, myself and most of the rest of us here are unprepared to listen to empty whining for the point of whining. You are creating useless bloat in this forum. ;-)

[linuxgeex]

I disagree with this assessment of IRIX. Look and feel had nothing to do with why SGI ran into problems. Rather, they got caught out by cheap graphics card hardware becoming much better and widely available on x86, and rather than doubling down on IRIX/MIPS where they had advantages, they threw it all away to pursue Itanium which was a dead end.
[snip] .
By not having confidence in their own platform the market quickly lost confidence as well and then the decline became inevitable.

I disagree... IRIX was killed by OpenGL, which ironically came from IRIX. IRIX's bread and butter was their hyperscale vector graphics processing. Nobody did 1000-way stacks like IRIX. Linux is only just now starting to solve problems with scheduling that IRIX had solved 30 years ago. OpenGL provided a platform for industry to step sideways on increasingly performant add-on GPU cards. That is what killed IRIX, not their desperate attempt to switch to what they perceived as the future of massively parallel computing in the face of having their rendering market swallowed whole by GPUs.... they were already dead men walking they just didn't recognise it.

[Delgarde]

I disagree with this assessment of IRIX. Look and feel had nothing to do with why SGI ran into problems.

Eh, I think it was part of it - remember, in the post you replied to, I'm talking about workstations, not servers (and I'd largely agree with you as to the latter) and I'm not talking exclusively about IRIX, but about all the classic UNIX workstations. Basically, by the early 2000s, they'd all stagnated... in terms of hardware, yes, but even more so in terms of software. I mean, the Linux desktops of the time were pretty rough, but they were alive, and evolving, and gradually improving. But the likes of SGI and HP... their desktop offerings weren't going anywhere.

[cj.wijtmans]

Uhm, no it does. Embedded projects routinely have to make 1MB or less kernels to fit on flash, and we are talking of kernel 4.4 or 4.9, not 2.something. You just show you're a noob if you claim this bullshit.

Also, WTF is "it does not fit on a floppy" again?

OMG modern linux cannot run on the first processor it ran 26 years ago (that is more comparable to a modern microcontroller)!?!?! OMG BLOAT!

So, your userspace is bloated and you blame the kernel?
You know right that embedded systems like OpenWRT/LEDE run on 32 MB of RAM (it's getting a bit tight, especially if you have the wifi drivers loaded) with 8 MB of flash (and can still fit a minimal router-grade system with web-interface on 4 MB of flash)?

I am actually horrified at how big the kernel is for my desktop pc. 1.5MBish, with everything stripped down that i dont need.

[cj.wijtmans]

Everybody sane knows it was controlled demolition, but don't pollute this thread with your bullshit. Everyone also knows jews did it. Furthermore, two towers, two planes and 100% success! Perfect demolition. I wonder why controlled demolition experts didn't go this way? However, it's not mossad's propaganda thread, so shut up.

Dont forget about the third building. building 7 or whatever.

[Guest]

Linux no longer fits on floppy? Ok. Did BSD or slowlaris ever fit on it? Ps. Isn't floppy not enough to support modern architectures? If it's bloat I want some more.

[starshipeleven]

I am actually horrified at how big the kernel is for my desktop pc. 1.5MBish, with everything stripped down that i dont need.

see this post https://www.phoronix.com/forums/foru...199#post974199

[cj.wijtmans]

see this post https://www.phoronix.com/forums/foru...199#post974199

looks like horseshit. what is your point?