Obligitory link - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6Vf8R_gOec

24 Displays done under Linux - on October last year. The drivers were carefully teased into that condition, and so the tech is on it's way.

Be aware that the RANDR/Xinerama maturity in Linux is weak, so it will take a few years for it to be able to handle >2 - note that it's take almost a decade to get reasonable 2-head support...

Sure, back when people knew the IPs of their local archie and simtel archives.

Those where the days...

Plug alert.

You should have a closer look at Phoronix Test Suite. The infrastructure is the half of the hard part in testing, so then it comes down to just writing the tests.

From the launch activities for the 5800 family.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6Vf8R_gOec

24 monitors, 4 cards, 1 PC. All consumer grade. All running Linux. And yes, there is bezel correction.

Yes, there are black lines for the monitors. I couldn't get the budget to do 24 50" Plasmas. But think beyond the demo part of the tech and think about the possibilities.

Aargh. Cat5 provides many more options than coax.. My bad.

If you have lots of coax running through pipes and if it is free, then use the coax as a wirepull to rewire the house.

Cat5 provides many more options than cat5.

The economics are fairly simple.

Your support, validation and sustaining costs don't contribute to the bottom line of your business. If you have a part of the product that takes a unnecessarily large proportion of the bottom line, you look at the value proposition. You do something as simple as removing the client for a platform, you save money.

BUT, if the product is based around open standards, the Linux community has a high probability of making something that will work anyway. For FREE. No support costs for a client, no development and validation costs either. Linux, with it's "Freedom" has an extremely high cost to be an ISV on, you have kernels, X versions, distributions.. All subtley different and all having precious consideration for the cost of operating in that ecosystem.

Google has many examples of killing/not creating a client, but fostering the capability. Google talk is a great example. Google still gets the branding value of the service, but doesn't need to have a client, I have *NEVER* heard anyone talk about "Google's JMPP or Jabber Service". I would expect that this is the same, but for google voice. The people carrying credit will probably be handled.

Phoronix Test Suite (http://www.phoronix-test-suite.com/) is open source.

Join the community, help define meaningful tests and benchmark.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzUyNA

over 60 megapixels. (4 GPUs, multi-head mode, with X-plane.)

The 24 head flight simulator at the launch was running Linux

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1069/1/

Display are 4 x 3x2 layouts, multi-asic with each having 1 head. Single processor, Ubuntu, X-Plane.

RANDR is great for configuring each head. You can't do multi-head with RANDR.

Judging by your posts and your handle, you work in or around servers - a lot.

You would probably be aware that security, stability, and all such things are a set of tradeoffs of risks and benefits/costs.

You can make a system 100% secure, but it may not be useable. You can make a system five 9's stable, but you have to pay for it. You make the assessment of the risk (in this case data corruption), against the benefit/costs (double the speed in some cases).

SuSE seemed to have made the assessment of risk without understanding the cost. They enabled barriers by default to take the high moral ground, but then didn't understand the cost of doing so.

Your analogy about buying a new gas oven is interesting. You look at the manuals and there are *many* ways that you can blow up your oven. It is just that the risk (of someone naively or accidentally blowing themselves up) has been balanced against the benefit of lower consumption of energy. There are many ways of managing risks - redundancy, accepting the risk, etc.

My prime point was that the benchmarking which yeilded questions - without the answers given - are extremely valuable. They allow the upstream people developing systems to understand that they need to consider the bigger picture and apply a risk/cost/benefit judgement and not close of all risks. I would expect that in later versions of SuSE they have turned off barriers now that the risk has been sufficiently understood and the costs determined as being commercially relevant.

Or using your analogy. The tests that the oven may blow up but save 50% on the energy bill has been shown that the net benefit is on the side of the oven that may potentially blow up!

The Phoronix benchmarking is intended to provide you the answers as to why. It is to highlight the stuff that has happened.

If performance management is going on within the kernel community, then this shouldn't come up as a shock. The whole purpose of independent testing is that you see something that looks out of place, investigate and resolve. A perfect example is http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel_atom_four&num=1 phoronix article, that showed that SuSE was trailing. This causes this http://lizards.opensuse.org/2008/12/16/comments-on-phoronix-benchmarking-opensuse-111/ discussion.

The question and answer don't need to be provided by the same voice. It is when you have someone questioning, and then someone answering, then you have a discussion, then finally you have progress.

To make it worse, there is virtually no reason that any number of the organizations supporting the leading developers can't invest a small amount of infrastructure and run the tests themselves. Phoronix Test Suite is absolutely trivial to use. The amount of "software development in autopilot" is frightening, this applies equally to Open Source as it does to Proprietary.