Microsoft Won't Sue Linux Users, Company Exec Says (InformationWeek)

Microsoft Won't Sue Linux Users, Company Exec Says (InformationWeek)

With 2.4 kernel you could maybe scale to 8 proccessors, and get some performance improvement. Anything beyond that and you'd loose performance.

Ugh, that statement is quite wrong and i've got to correct it. Linux 2.0 (the first SMP capable Linux kernel, released 11 years ago in 1996) was successfully booted on a 36-CPU system back then. Scalability sucked but it got improved gradually in 2.2, 2.4 and 2.6.

With Linux 2.4 you could scale to well over 8 processors with user-space load - and with specific areas of bottlenecks for kernel-bound workloads. Note that most stuff users run is _user-space code_. So the 2.4 Linux kernel, for all practical purposes, was quite useful up to 64 CPUs or so. If you threw kernel-intense benchmarks at it you'd see bottlenecks, but if you used it to do things like calculations then it would scale quite linearly.

And also note that what matters is the hardware that is commonly available. Linux gradually evolved its SMP code in the x86 space, and as x86 grew larger and larger, so did Linux follow it. The largest Linux systems right now run 4096 CPUs (in the same system image - i.e. not clusters), and such systems simply were not mainstream-available 5 or 10 years ago.