What are the differences between some commercial and non-commercial UNIX

Y

Thread Starter

Yamashita

Hi, guys, this is Yamashita, an electric engineer of plant equipments.

This is exactly my case, but I want to know abou, so if anyone know about UNIX system, please answer my question.

My colleague and supplier began to investigate some new factory CIM system, because, so far, we use a kind of original system (this kind of
system should be called "DCS", right?) of the same supplier, but after about 2003, this system cannot get anymore for stopping production.

You may guess it's too soon to investigate, but this system is quite huge, and we should bring this new system into another new factory in
about 2 years, we cannot say this is enough.

Anyway, the system engineer of the supplier said to my colleague who is in charge that the new system would be some UNIX system based, of
cource we agreed in this point, but the Solaris was quite heavy for this purpOse so he would use Linux based system.

Unfortunately, my colleague doesn't have enough knowledge about UNIX itself, because he never touch that and only use Windows9*, so in this
situation, the vendor can control him easily.
It might cause some trouble in some cases.

So, I want to ask some question.

I've heard that non-commercial UNIX system, like Linux and FreeBSD(I prefer this), is weaker than commercial UNIX, like Solaris, in the region of memory protection ,process administration and etc., but, for me, I'm not *pure* UNIX system engineer just hobbist, so I don't know exactly about that.

But I guess, this kind of differences must be very important, critical matter if in the case of quite important server system.

Can anyone explain about these for me ?

And next, the SE said that Solaris is *heavy* than Linux.Of course, I know that Solaris is heavy, but, nowadays, I've heard that Linux
system became heavier and heavier, so we don't have to care about this weak point, right ?

regards.
--
Yamashita Taiichiro
 
R

Ranjan Acharya

I'm no Unix wiz, but I read that Linux / FreeBSD are not just less robust than AIX, HP-UX et cetera but not as fast either.

RJ
 
M

Michael Klothe

Mr. Yamashita, All:

IMHO ---

Linux, FreeBSD and the like are fine for fooling around in the office or at home.

For hard core business applications, where your livelihood (and that of others) depends on your system and its design, don't even consider anything but an established UNIX backed by a major manufacturer.

Linux is an especially poor choice within the context stated. It is an "open system", meaning every Joe, Frank, Harry, Bill and Tom, and their uncles, mothers, grandparents and next-door neighbors have felt free to produce a variant of it. In truth there is no such thing as "Linux", only the countless variants.

There are no countless variants of , say, "Solaris" and similar commercial UNIX products. Go with what you can depend on, sold and supported by a company you can depend on.

Regards,

-- MEK
 
R
Well, I have had experience running the same software on Linux and AIX....

> So, I want to ask some question.
>
> I've heard that non-commercial UNIX system, like Linux and FreeBSD(I
> prefer this), is weaker than commercial UNIX, like Solaris, in the
> reagion of memory protection ,process administration and etc., but,
> for me, I'm not *pure* UNIX system engineer just hobbist, so I don't
> know exactly about that.

Big Unices such as Solaris and Aix are more capable with big systems, but get scale in mind.
The sort of Solaris units that are used in sites such as Hotmail and Amazon are capable of a
million plus users. FreeBSD and Linux are often referred to a less capable systems, but this
is comparing them to thier big cousins, their capabilities are tremendous when compared to
windows.

Even so, most applications that could be done with Linux or FreeBSD could also be handled
with NT, but there is a big and important difference. If the system needs to be scaled up,
it is very easy to switch from one UNIX to another, or run mixed systems by substituting a
single overloaded Linux/BSD box for e.g. a big solaris machine. Despite popular misconception there is an extremely high degree of compatibility between 'nix systems, far more so than there is between different versions of windows. Put another way, if you need several systems it is almost certinally more logical to start with all Linux/BSD boxes, and upgrade only specific boxes if necessary.

As for wither Linux or BSD....... BSD development has been far more specific and, pedantic, than Linux. FreeBSD development has been very much pointed towards net servers. In specific
applications (mainly internet related) FreeBSD excells over Linux, whilst Linux covers a much
broader range of applications. In your case you are probably better of with Linux, but there
is not much in it, BSD will run Linux apps, but is not able to use Linux device drivers and
there are much more of these available for Linux.

Also, a lot of the 'improvements' one sees between a big Unix box and Linux or FreeBSD on a
PC is actually hardware related. Unix workstations cost more than PC's, but you get more
hardware for your money. Of course Linux is not restricted to PC hardware, many Internet sites and film industry users (not to mention people who build supercomputing clusters) rely on The Alpha platform which Linux has supported for several years in full 64-bit mode. 64-bit becomes particularly important if you will be using filesystems or memory greater than 2GB, 32-bit systems can never use these efficiently. IBM offer
Linux on all their server platforms, from powerPC througth to 390 mainframes. The 390 might be overkill;-) but thier PowerPC based workstations are excellent workhorses. And, oh yes, you can use Linux in 64-bit mode on Sparc workstations.

An important feature of large systems is a journaling filesystem. IBM have notoriously good filesystems, and it seems they have contributed
ths know how to Linux. SGI have also contributed to Linux filesystems. In what commercial distribution you may allready see the fruits of their work I do not know, but it is worth investigating. IBM filesystem are exceptionaly robust. In fact under AIX you could add a new disk, format it, and use the space to increase the size of a volume while it was STILL BEING USED my multiple users, let alone re-boot, and without fear. If IBM are pumping that kind of expertise in Linux boxes I say look no further!

I do not know when you will be buying your hardware, but the new Intel 64 bit chip (merced)
is just emerging with (albeit buggy) systems finding thier way into the hands of developers.
Linux allready runs on these systems, the porting having been done by Intel in house
engineers.

> And next, the SE said that Solaris is *heavy* than Linux.Of course, I
> know that Solaris is heavy, but, nowadays, I've heard that Linux
> system became heavier and heavier, so we don't have to care about this
> weak point, right ?

Wrong. Linux is very highly configurable, even by the end user. It is easy to fine tune a box to an application leaving out all that is not required. You can have a box that it is capable of top notch performance for specific services which, unloaded,consumes less resources than W95.

It is not just a performance issue. Many people, myself included, believe that the possibility to simplify the system is a key to the stability and
reliability. KISS and more formal reliability analysis would bear us out on this.

The bottom line is go for the cheapest and simplest solution that should fit your needs, happy in the knowledge that it is easy to scale up
individual elements of a Unix system to whatever your requirements may be.

BTW, the free in Linux and freeBSD means free as in free speech, not free beer. They are open source, so you could download it and do it
yourself, but in reality you are far more likely to opt for commercial offerings, pre-packed ready to go and with technical support. This will
cost you (this is how the Linux community makes a living, with the service). The flipside of this is that once you have a system up and running, you can replicate it without additional OS fees.
 
Top