31–40 of 221 posts
https://www.usa.philips.com/healthcare/solutions/radiation-o...
Last I heard they were desperately trying to get it on Linux. Why it isn't is because its a huge legacy application with some very horrible hacks specific to the OS.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Illumos is open source Solaris.
illumos has a Solaris heritage, certainly -- but has evolved quite a bit in the last ~12 years. For details of the history, see my LISA 2011 talk.[0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc
"Coming of Age" and the "Don't Anthropomorphize Larry Ellison" talk are especially great.
There’s a bunch of enterprisey technology that is not yet dead, but dying very slowly.
There was a common set of cshell based tools used between those two environments, among other 90s style Unix tools, like software written againt the SunOS Open Look widgets, and tools written in Tcl/Tk.
I wonder if those machines are still in use!
I worked at an ISP in 2007 which was running mostly on Sun hardware and Solaris. This was because of huge discounts provided by Sun. Most devs ran Linux on their workstations. In 2014 I got to work with some guy whose previous project had been at that ISP, who was at that point desperately trying to move off Solaris because they had to start paying list price for the OS and it was much too expensive.
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Technially, the Darwin Kernel it uses is OSS https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu
Can you actually recompile your kernel on Mac? And its functional? I'll bet this isn't even the source code Apple uses, but rather they have a private fork with extra patches (similar to how Microsoft publishes OSS VS Code, but then uses their own proprietary version for releases).
However, it involved finding some random blog post on how to do it, and then even once I got it up and running there were some issues like the fans being pegged at 100%. Still, it was mostly functional.
They released a major update in 2020 that allowed you to move windows around the screen. It was groundbreaking.
But let me tell you, this system was absolutely terrible. All the machines were full x86 desktops with no hard drive, they netbooted from the manager's computer. Why not a thin client? A mystery.
The system stored a local cache of the database, which is only superficially useful. The cache is always several days, weeks, or months out of date, depending on what data you need. Most functions require querying the database hosted at corporate HQ in Cleveland. That link is up about 90% of the time, and when it's down, every store in the country is crippled.
It crashed frequently and is fundamentally incapable of concurrent access: if an order is open on the mixing station, you cannot access that order to bill the customer, and you can't access their account at all. Frequently, the system loses track of which records are open, requiring the manager manually override the DB lock just to bill an order.
If a store has been operating for more than a couple of years, the DB gets bloated or fragmented or something, and the entire system slows to a crawl. It takes minutes to open an order.
Which is all to say it's a bad system that cannot support their current scale of business.
I worked on a system deployed on AIX for a few years. We used it to distribute batch workloads in parallel across a cluster of machines - no other software and OS did such a thing, maybe still doesn't. The machines themselves were PowerPC RS6000's which only ran AIX. The company already had a close relationship with IBM because they'd been running mainframes for decades. They made tons of money so saving money on lic…
What am I missing?
One of my college courses ages ago was about working with MPI which we got to run on the hpc cluster.
The last time I needed to run N copies of something I asked kubernetes to do it. The time before that, I asked $cloud_vendor for N identical VMs with the same cloud-init script.
Supposedly Google's in-house stuff that kubernetes and map-reduce (the product, not the concept) are public versions of, is all about running stuff well on huge groups of machines.