
SGI Visual Workstation to run Linux by Year End 57
Caballero writes "This
article on
news.com says that SGI will be supporting Linux on their visual workstation products by the end of the year.
" The real key is that while current workstations
can boot
Linux, they aren't really optimized for it. SGI is putting
the effort in to let Linux shine on their hardware. We hope.
SGI intentended to run Linux from the start? (Score:1)
If the IRIX-Linux convergence runs really well, I guess we can expect to see some of the high-end animation software getting ported over to Linux. And boy would I like that!
Ooo... Maya...
How about a BeOS port? (Score:2)
I mean, Linux is great and all, but the only thing I think it has on BeOS in terms of suitability for multimedia type stuff is more applications and better hardware support. (And that is the same one thing that Windows has on Linux for any use.)
Where are the friggin' moderators?! (Score:1)
Re:Impending culture clash? (Score:1)
Re:How about a BeOS port? (Score:1)
If SGI contacted Be, and was willing to provide an engineer or two to help with the port, I bet Be would be more than willing to support the Visual Workstations.
Even though I can't afford it, if the Visual Workstation ran the BeOS, I'd buy one.
geoff
Re:Visual "Workstations" (Score:1)
Unfortunate translation: cheap.
Check it out: (Score:1)
Re:Visual "Workstations" (Score:1)
The SGI VWS outclasses anything produced by traditional PC manufacturers.
SoftImage and all the cool stuff (Score:1)
Yeah, that would be great. But SoftImage and Maya aren't SGI's properties, and therefore the companies have to be nice and port it to Linux. Houdini will be ported to Linux, probably other companies will follow. Incertainty is the bottleneck for a lot of companies. Porting is serious business, but seeing hard- and software going in Linux's direction makes companies believe they invest in something that will last for the long term. After all, companies are commercial and will do things that they can benefit of.
Re:Irix merging with Linux (Score:2)
SGI can help Linux out a great deal by providing dedicated hardware which supports some Linux nicities. First on my list would be support for full configuration via the serial port, similar to the SPARC systems from Sun.
Of course, it's also gratifying to see another vendor promising support for IA-64. This is enough of a radical departure from IA-32 that compiler support will be very tricky. IA-64 requires the compiler to properly order the instructions in order to gain any performance over IA-32. Without a very thorough optimizer, Linux on IA-64 would likely run slower than on IA-32. Since SGI is banking on high performance, it seems likely they'll contribute to EGCS or GCC.
I'm also looking forward to using XFS on linux. Imagine a logging filesystem with no 2GB file size limits...
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Irix merging with Linux (Score:1)
Don't we need special name for the Linux on SGI?
Yes, maybe
it may be called 'Rinux' if Linux is beneficiary,
or
'ILix' in the opposite case.
Re:SoftImage and all the cool stuff (Score:1)
Is BeOS likely to run on the VWS at some point? If it did, I'd be a lot more interested in getting one, since Be multimedia applications (and the overall smoothness of the system) show real promise.
D
----
USB keyboard/mouse under NT? (Score:1)
Overall, they're pretty sexy as PCs go, but nothing like other sgi boxes.
-Chris
Re:PI anyone? (Score:2)
So, I suspect that SGI is working with PI closely and will use the DRI.
thad
Re:OpenGL? (Score:1)
How many will you buy if they do? :-)
Me? Probably none -- most likely the closest thing I will do in the next two years to what this box is designed for, is some simple work in mechanical CAD, and I'm afraid, it will be an overkill.
And unless I am terribly wrong, this box is not supposed to be a competitor for x86/alpha/sparc/ppc servers that are already present at the market. This leaves its original target -- high-performance graphics workstations, just not with NT. But to get any advantage over a thing, I can build in an hour from parts, bought in the nearest store for pennies (compared to VW cost) it better should be Really Good with graphics. Otherwise all its expensive hardware will be useless without NT, and the whole effort of porting Linux to it will give no result -- people who need a Linux box with lousy graphics (server, not-really-graphics-oriented desktop -- I am in this category) will get something else because it's cheaper, and people who need high-end graphics, at best (for you) will get VW with NT and at worst will get anything else with more standard or better supported by vendor hardware.
OTOH if it will be something outstanding as graphics desktop with Linux, people who want high-performance graphics and unixlike OS, will have a choice other than IRIX on MIPS box, yet still produced by SGI, and with all software there.
OpenGL? (Score:1)
Does this mean that SGI promises that at the end of this year they will have production-quality X and OpenGL with hardware acceleration support on them? Without that those boxes will be kinda pointless to use -- they are graphics-oriented workstations.
Also is SGI going to do something to get third-party IRIX-based software ported to Linux for those boxes (developers' porting support, conversion library kits)?
BeOS on Visual Workstation? (Score:1)
How much effort would there be in porting something like this, since it seems to be pretty much up to Be to do it.
Re:OpenGL? (Score:1)
> of this year they will have production-quality X
> and OpenGL with hardware acceleration support on
> them?
How many will you buy if they do?
SGI Linux/OpenGL job openings (Score:2)
Jon Leech
SGI Core OpenGL Group
Re:Irix merging with Linux (Score:2)
As Linus noted, support for more than 4 processors would add unnecessary kernel overhead for uniprocessors. I suspect SGI would include this as one of their value added features of Linux + Irix (somebody better think of a better logo for this rather than a rainbow colored penguin).
SGI exec team are not stupid (although their marketing guys seem to be rather flat-footed), if OS innovations are being generated faster by an external group (which Linux appears to be at the moment) then it is better to harness the external momentum and build on top of it and reallocate precious staff resources to where it is really needed. Personally I would see great benefits in tuning the GNU compilers to be more aware of the underlying cache systems and their souped up bus (those cache-lines, false sharing, etc) are a pain to manually exploit and also makes the standard code base rather unportable. SGI also has got some nice memory subsystem hardware which could benefit from going mainstream to really sort out that kfluffle between NGIO and FIO.
Imagine the CPU grunt of an Alpha, the I/O, memory and graphics of an SGI, peripherals of IBM, the pricing of Dell, and the software stability of Linux as your dream box.
Let each vendor concentrate on their strengths and allow the free market to decide on the worth of their products based on a unencumbered and informed choice!
LL
Re:USB keyboard/mouse under NT? (Score:1)
-Chris
USB and Linux (Score:1)
URL mis-typing (Score:1)
nifty... (Score:1)
PI anyone? (Score:3)
Without the pipeline infrastructure, it wouldn't be possible to render [as fast as possible] to an X window, wouldn't it?
Irix merging with Linux (Score:2)
Imagine Linux running 128 CPUs in the same box with a massive amount of memory.
/me drools
best news ive heard today. (Score:1)
-Z
Re:PI anyone? (Score:1)
I think though that they have opened a lot of this technology and it may actually be part of the Xfree effort.
Nevertheless, I wouldn't be suprised if full support for their display is only available in binary-only form.
SGI URL Wrong (Score:1)
visual workstation products [sgi.com]
- |Daryll
I really hope SGI gets rockin' on this! (Score:3)
I just got one of these babies, and I hope that SGI will get going on the port! Right now there's a website under SGI's domain with info on Linux for their various systems.
http://www.linux.sgi.com/ [sgi.com]The good news:
It runs (Yea!)
It will display on the flat screen (YES!)
The bad news:
It needs an IDE (no SCSI)
No X acceleration
No OpenGL acceleration
"Very little" PCI card support
I'm loading it when I get my next paycheck and I can pick up an IDE drive! I'll keep you all informed...
-Stryemer
We are the music makers,
and we are the dreamers of the dream.
Re:Linux is VWs only hope (Score:1)
Nice... (Score:1)
Re:Linux is VWs only hope (Score:1)
Yes, the VW are not standard white boxes using an Intel motherboard - the Cobalt graphics hardware precludes that. If all you want is a run of the mill PC, they're easy enough to find.
Better support seems certain (Score:2)
I'm also pretty certain I saw it running in SMP mode, but the memory detection didn't appear to be correct.
Holding your LUG meeting at SGI has certain advantages.
Re:PI anyone? (Score:2)
sgi provided GLX to the open source community, and we integrated it into XFree. They are also funding some of our work.
I don't know if they are using our framework for the visual workstation, but regardless, I'm sure it'll perform well.
- |Daryll
Re:PI anyone? (Score:3)
That's right (jointly funded together with Red Hat, actually). I've also put together a group to define compile and runtime standards for OpenGL and Mesa on Linux, so that no matter what the underlying OpenGL driver (DRI, commercial from Metro Link or Xi, etc.), apps can run cleanly. This will be important in 6 months or so, as more hardware drivers become available.
Jon Leech
SGI Core OpenGL Group
Impending culture clash? (Score:1)
One of the things that caught my attention in this article was all of the talk about SGI working with Linux, Irix and Linux converging, etc. When SGI released XFS, many people on different forums assumed that this code would drop right on in and become the new Linux file system. The reality, of course, is that much hacking remains before this goes in, if this goes in, to the Linux kernel proper.
I've got to wonder about what will happen as code contributions come increasingly from corporations dropping large bundles into our laps, as opposed to small patches here and there, or a recognized kernel hacker, who already knows how things work, and how Linus prefers code, setting out to rewrite something.
There was a lot of talk about the Linus burnouts during the 2.1.x process, and I don't know if large contributions like XFS would help or hinder this. Hopefully, we'll see corporations get better at contributing to Linux, as well as see our beloved kernel hackers get better at working with corporations.
--
Ian Peters
Linux is VWs only hope (Score:2)
Of course even then the VW is only marginally useful. One empty 64-bit PCI (how many 64-bit cards are out there?), non-standard memory and bus all add up to make the VWs fun machines to play with, but an expensive nightmare to maintain and make usable.
Intergraph (Score:1)
Re:Impending culture clash? (Score:1)
Re:How about a BeOS port? (Score:1)