LWN: Comments on "KS2007: The customer panel"

KS2007: The customer panel

renox — 2007-09-20T11:05:00+00:00

About the need to send quicky small packets: we have a similar need in my company for redondancy purpose (pinging other computer to ensure that they are working): a 40ms delay is a lot (we're not using TCP though to do this but UDP, and we're still in 2.4, so I don't know if in 2.6 we would have the same issue of not).

About the 'swap prefetch', it's sad how it was rejected out of the kernel as kernel dev saw no need of this feature: here's a customer complaining, maybe kernel devs will change their mind (though it would need a new maintainer..).

Dreamworks

landley — 2007-09-12T01:13:56+00:00

There are historical reasons as well. Don't forget that Silicon Graphics
was a Unix shop (VAX through Irix), and SGI discontinued Irix in favor of
Linux at the start of the decade.

Dreamworks

pr1268 — 2007-09-10T23:52:46+00:00

> They don't use Linux because it's Free Software, they use it because it's free software.

That's an interesting perspective. It didn't initially occur to me that Dreamworks' server farms of thousands of computers would pose an enormous expense just for the operating system licensing alone, had they decided to use a proprietary OS. Not to mention that certain OSes charge license fees based on the number of physical CPUs per server, or by the number of incoming connections (I won't mention any names).

KS2007: The customer panel

garloff — 2007-09-10T18:39:49+00:00

I'm glad someone found /proc/$PID/oom_adj.

Dreamworks

joedrew — 2007-09-10T13:20:30+00:00

I work in the 3D animation business, so Dreamworks' presentation isn't surprising to me. For those who don't know, it's not just Dreamworks that runs Linux -- it's the entire 3D animation industry. Sony Pictures Imageworks, Digital Domain, Dreamworks, Disney, etc. All large studios run Linux. (And they're the real reason that companies like NVIDIA and AMD have had good, but proprietary, 3D drivers for so long -- there's huge money in the high-end professional market.)

Their apparent lack of technical knowledge isn't surprising, though. Their core competency isn't Linux, it's 3D, and so they spend their R&D budget on that. They don't use Linux because it's Free Software, they use it because it's free software. (Its capabilities help too.) That's a good thing, though -- 3D animation companies are a huge user of Linux, but they're a user of Linux that tends much more towards the "Aunt Mae" than the usual user of Linux.

Nagle and Credit Suisse

corbet — 2007-09-09T13:36:52+00:00

They do disable Nagle and do just about everything else they can possibly think of. But they still run into problems.

Nagle and Credit Suisse

gdt — 2007-09-09T08:32:42+00:00

Did Credit Suisse say why their application does not disable the Nagle algorithm using the TCP_NODELAY socket option? If the application source is not available then they can write a Netfilter module to set the socket option (I wrote a similar module to select the TCP algorithm for binary programs, I owe the netdev people a similar patch which uses the routing table).

KS2007: The customer panel

NCunningham — 2007-09-09T05:14:07+00:00

+1. I just about habitually tell TuxOnIce users to apply it when they're trying to diagnose problems with hibernation. It's pretty useful for finding out which driver is stopping them from successfully hibernating. (It doesn't help in all circumstances, but it does in a good proportion).

KS2007: The customer panel

linuxbox — 2007-09-09T01:40:22+00:00

Is no one really sure why people ask for an integrated kernel debugger? I value KDB a great deal. I regularly patch it into mainline kernels. I'm obviously not alone.