Date: Thu, 12 Dec 2002 14:19:33 -0800 (PST) From: Mike Hoskins <mike@adept.org> To: freebsd-cluster@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: (long, warm & fuzzy) Re: sharing files within a cluster Message-ID: <20021212133117.D2430-100000@fubar.adept.org> In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0212121030540.18020-100000@carotid.ccs.lanl.gov>
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On Thu, 12 Dec 2002, Ronald G. Minnich wrote:
> My apologies, the "linuxbios naming" thing really teed me off.
Please understand that this state of "teed off" is, for the most part,
what BSD advocates feel like all the time...
Linux has advantages (at least it's not M$!), and it's gained mass
appeal... But "mass appeal" didn't cause technical people to love M$...
So some of us have the same sort of "you've only won because the people
with the money made the decission and not the people with the engineering
degrees" mentality. At least I do.
I'm just trying to give some personal background... To (hopefully) help
you understand that (like you) I can often post heated arguments to
mailing lists when I should just get up and pass out or drink more coffee.
:) So please don't take things personally. I have strong opinions, and
the almost 50/50 German/Irish blood in my veins doesn't typically promote
good discussion/interaction skills. Trust me, I pay for my temper and
impatience every day. ;)
> I'm also
> sorry to be so darned tactless, a lot of those messages I was just
> pounding out between Pink bringing firefighting or early in the morning
> when I should sleep instead of write email. I apologize to this list.
And I'm just another dot-com guy that hasn't lost his job yet (sometimes
wish I would, but not really when there's bills to pay)... So we're all
posting in states of relatively-high mental stress. :)
Don't apologize for tactlessness, I honestly think we could use a lot less
tact in the world. For the most part, yell and shout at me, do whatever
you need to do to convince me of something if you know (or believe) it's
right. You have my word I won't get offended.
> > Your "read and learn" comment is just the kind of pompousity I expect
> > from the academic world.
> I gotta watch that. I'm being terse and I guess I should not be.
We all do. I apologize for any unfounded terseness on my part. (Trust
me, search the archives, you'll find plenty of it.) That said, I know (I
don't doubt for a minute) that we all want the same thing... A robust,
reliable, working solution for *BSD. (My dream would be to help all the
BSDs, not just Free*... But from your page it looks like Free is lagging
the farthest behind wrt PIRQ.)
Unfortuneately, I sometimes feel like a technical posistion in today's
economic environment can be more taxing than ever... But we have to be
careful not to start viewing each other as enemies... Otherwise, who do
we have as friends?
> since I have not been in the academic world for 14 years, I've been
> building HPC systems for various gov't and commercial entities instead.
You obviouslly have the most experience among us, so I thank you for
bearing with my shortcomings and continuing to keep and open mind, offer
assistance, etc.
> I would really encourage people to get at the literature of SSI, going
> back to Farber's original DCS paper in '72, and try to find an angle that
> is somehow new and uniquely suited to FreeBSD.
I think some of the rendering farms that have been BSD based, while
possibly not showing an area uniquely suited to BSD, do clearly show that
there would be plenty of demand for BSD clusters.
I remember when Linux wasn't so popular. (Anyone else spend all night
getting the chat script just right so you could dialup in Slackware 1.0?)
When I got my for Unix admin job, I was almost laughed out of the
building when I revealed I used Slackware at home and not some BSD...
When it did start gaining momentum, a lot of Linux folks (friends,
coworkers, IRC channels, mailing lists, etc.) adopted the mentality "we're
winning, because we have more users" -- most *BSD folks, however, adopted
the much more founded (IMO!) "uh, windows has lots of users too, with lots
of money behind it... that doesn't mean it's great" train of thought.
Competition is a funny thing... I think we all hate M$ ("butchering
standards for fun and profit")... But when it comes to working together
as a community (the opensource community, let's say)... We instead focus
on our differences. And, most certainly, I am no exception.
Some of these biases (Linux folks against BSD, BSD against Linux, Free
against Open, RH against Debian, etc.) have formed based upon real world
experience... so it's hard to get the sort of mindshare we really need
across camps. I don't know if there's an easy solution, because it really
just boils down to everyone swallowing their pride... and that's
something that takes human beings awhile.
> And "Linux sucks, FreeBSD
> rules" is not going to be the thing that does it. What about FreeBSD can
> somehow make it much better for clustering? That's the problem I've never
> been able to answer -- maybe one of you can.
This could maybe be reduced to "What makes FreeBSD better than Linux?"
That's a loaded question, and will certainly provide very different
answers based upon whom you ask. For me, just being able to use
FreeBSD... The OS that years of admin work have taught me to trust... is
enough of an advantage for me to join this list rather than using existing
solutions.
> This list is sporadically active, but there have not been tons of new
> ideas crossing it -- seems like we see the same stuff over and over again.
I don't think that's necessarily as bad as it may sound. For the most
part, humans are prone to error... And discussion and peer review is
rarely bad in technical circles.
> Because, and as a former FreeBSD cluster builder I hate to say this, Linux
> won. And the mindshare is in Linux, as are the compilers, 3rd party apps,
> and all the big vendors. There are many 10s of millions of dollars of
> clustering money being spent by IBM, HP, Intel, etc., etc. and absent
> something really new and innovative I don't see FreeBSD breaking in.
The same was said for M$ when Linux was born. :) It's funny that many of
the arguments that are now made for Linux have historically been made for
Windows. I really hope M$ doesn't decide to muck around in the Linux
world as they've implied... They could only make things worse. (Granted,
there would be lots of money invested.)
> The closed-minded nature of the FreeBSD core has not helped. I wrote a DSM
> for FreeBSD 2.0.5 ca. 1994, which was based on simple mods to NFS --
> called MNFS (really it was a port from a SunOS version I also wrote). It
> required a simple extension to the VM system (it required the VM layer to
> tell the VFS layer if a page fault was for read or read/write -- that's
> what SunOS does) and I could not get the FreeBSD core to add this simple
> additional parameter -- it violated "information hiding between layers",
> which is good in theory but in practice the more info the better. (this
> code is still on my web page along with the MNFS papers).
You call them close-minded, I call them the guardians of my personal
interests. A simple VM change to you, if found so objectionable to an
entire team of developers (who obviouslly maintain a great OS), should at
least me more thoroughly reviewed IMCO.
I am not saying there were any technical (or other) problems with your
extension, but I think the core team has to be bullish. If your extension
ends up causing other people trouble... Fingers will point at core.
(That's why they're there.)
This more structured development process is just one of the many reasons
I've migrated to BSD and not Linux. Numerous driver, kernel, VM, etc.
issues have bitten me in the past on various Linux platforms. Most people
I know that deploy Linux servers, then migrate to some BSD... Typically
say it's due to stablity. Performance, for the most part, has greatly
equalized. (Assuming gurus from both sides tune the respective machines,
something many past tests made obvious was not the case.)
> clobbered by the rest of the world. What we got steamrolled by was the
> availability of so many 3rd part apps.
That's a Windows argument if I've ever heard one. Not sure how we can
combat that, other than selling out (yes, I view it that way...) like
Linux has. (More users, more patches... Not necessarily more clue or
working patches, ala RedHat, but patches nontheless!)
> Sorry, Andy. I'll try to behave.
I'll do the same. It's often hard to talk about things calmly and
rationaly, even when you know you should, when you've been personally
affected by related issues.
Now I just have to go explain to my Linux-using friends why I'm runing
LinuxBIOS if BSD's so great. ;)
--
Mike Hoskins This message is RFC 1855 compliant,
mike@adept.org www.adept.org/pub/rfcs/rfc1855.html
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