From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Wed Dec 29 1999 - 02:56:46 MST
[ posting delayed -- I've been away from this mailbox for a week of
drinking :]
On Fri, Dec 24, 1999 at 08:59:03AM -0800, Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
> >
> If the Linux companies are making it easier to configure and beef
> up the file system (to support journaling [perhaps using SGI's code],
> support raw devices [for databases], etc.), get up-to-date with the
> fast-moving hardware, then you may be right.
Both of those items are in the feature list for the 2.4 kernel, which
should be coming out some time before March. (SGI's XFS filesystem
does journaling; so does Stephen Tweedie's ext3 filesystem, which
has the advantage of being upward -- and downward -- compatible with
the current ext2 filesystem.) Raw device access is, IIRC, already in
place in the 2.3 development tree.
What I find really interesting is the way Windows NT has evolved.
Originally touted as a cross-platform OS, Microsoft has quietly
dropped support, processor by processor ... until it's now an IA32-only
system. Given that Windows 2000 is huge -- I pass no judgement on whether
this is good or bad -- I can't help wondering how easy they're going
to find the process of moving 30MLoc of platform-dependent code to a
new architecture. (The phrase "painted themselves into a corner" springs
to mind.)
-- Charlie
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