[OpenIndiana-discuss] I figured this deserved a separate thread

[Allan E. Registos]

Thank you for such insightful comments. 
At office, we have a quad core phenom with nVidia 9400 and with mobo Gigabyte. 
I would like to test OI on it and if there are no issues with regards to any drivers in OI, I will use it as my primary host OS. 


----- Original Message -----
From: "Tom Kranz" <tom at siliconbunny.com> 
To: "Discussion list for OpenIndiana" <openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org> 
Sent: Friday, November 5, 2010 6:39:49 PM 
Subject: Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] I figured this deserved a separate thread 

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Allan E. Registos wrote: 
>> No, OpenIndiana both targets Desktops and Server 
> 
> 
> That is what most GNU/Linux distributions have done since the dawn of 
time. 
This is what Solaris (and IRIX, and other UNIXs) have done since, 
well, as long as I've been playing with them, almost 20 odd years now. 

As IRIX in particular has shown, an OS optimised for heavy desktop use 
(stability, balanced use of resources, huge I/O optimisations, 
efficient memory management) is also the same class of optimisations 
that a server requires. 
> But the recent(well not quite recent) spat between Ingo Molnar and Con 
Kolivas (Linux kernel developers) does represent the major problem of 
Linux desktops : _responsiveness_. OI for desktop needs to be optimized 
for the desktop to IMO, unless there are technical issues. 
No, it doesn't. It may need specific drivers to be installed to 
support specific desktop hardware - but unless that hardware is 
detected, the drivers won't be loaded and won't be installed. Wrapping 
those drivers up in a seperate installation 'bundle' might make sense, 
although with the way IPS and the installer handles things, I don't 
see a pressing need to return to the "Entire Distribution plus OEM 
support" option that Solaris provides. 

There's a big chunk of Solaris history that newcomers to OI probably 
aren't aware of - but the Solaris kernel is hugely performant and is 
very much self-tuning to load. There is not much that can be tweaked, 
there's even less that it is advisable to tweak, and features like 
projects and other resource controls enable most common things like 
size of shared memory segments and number of semaphore to be tuned on 
the fly. 

We haven't needed to recompile the SunOS kernel to change settings 
since the dark days of SunOS 4 - and the world is much better for it. 

Focus on drivers and bundled apps, and let the kernel sort itself out 
for load and hardware - it's pretty good at it (after all, it's been 
doing it since 1992). 

Cheers, 
TOM 

- -- 
Tom Kranz 
Email: tom at gaeltd.com Skype: siliconbunny 
Mobile: 07779 149281 Phone/fax: 01344 773240 
http://www.gaeltd.com http://www.linkedin.com/in/tomkranz 
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