[ Thanks to Frankie
Tay for this link. ]
So, how did Linux become so capable of scaling beyond the
heights of the old UNIXs. More importantly, who helped put what
where?“As with the marketing of cars and TVs, it is the vendor’s high
end leading edge models which sells the standard models, from which
most of the sales and profit is made. For the enterprise server
market today, that high end is multi-headed 64bit SMP ( shared
memory multiprocessor ) systems, never mind the fact that single
32bit processors provide more than enough power to do most jobs.
For all intensive purposes, it is the ability of the core OS to
scale on 64Bit SMP systems that defines ‘enterprise scalability.’
Other enterprise feature are effectively just addons, which in the
case of Linux, have been freely contributed from many vendors and
developers.“Since version 2.0, Linux was more than just a 32bit x86
operating system. With the insistence and assistance of John
‘Maddog’ Hall, Linux was already ported to the 64Bit Alpha
processor, which delivered great performance and stability. Just
like the traditional AT&T UNIX source base, the ownership of
the Alpha chipset passed though many hands, suffering the same fate
of a thousand cutbacks. Even Alpha’s ‘native’ OS, VMS, has been
ported to Itanium by HP/Compaq…”