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#21
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On Thu, 08 Jan 2004 20:03:13 GMT, "GreyCloud"
wrote: The real issue is whether the Itanium port has been done competently, or by simply spawning off another completely unportable code stream. I have not heard any reliable rumours either way. OpenVMS has been ported successfully to the Itanium2 processor as well as TRU-64 UNIX. Whether HP keeps tru-64 unix is another question tho. When M$ has ported XP to the Itanium2 isn't known here nor have I seen any ads on M$ website about it. WinXP was ported to IA-64 long ago. Here's the webpage for WinXP 64-bit edition for IA-64: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/64bit/default.asp I guess this wasn't really done for the Itanium2 since it predates that chip, but it certainly will run with no troubles at all on it. More recently MS released Win2003 Server for IA-64. FWIW at least in theory WinNT was designed to be very portable. The entire system was built with a hardware abstraction layer that was supposed to minimize the amount of architecture-specific code. Now, I'm not sure just how successful this attempt was, but the basis is there. At various times NT was reported to have been running on PowerPC and MIPS in addition to the Alpha, i386 and IA-64 instruction sets that it was officially released for. Combined with the upcoming AMD64 port that makes for a fairly impressive array of architectures, though several of them were stillborn. ------------- Tony Hill hilla underscore 20 at yahoo dot ca |
#22
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chrisv wrote:
You can't tell me it would take all THAT much manpower for a company like ATI to compile their drivers for the half-dozen or so leading Linux distributions. It does take THAT much manpower and more. ATI hasn't had a stellar record by any stretch even while compiling for wintel only and one can only expect even lower quality when compiling for 6-10 different platforms. nVidia has had an only slightly better record. But there are other much smaller manufacturers of hardware which will be buried under a load they cannot handle peoperly, so the users of ALL platforms do suffer, which will only get worse. Competition is usually good but the ideal in hardware/OS level would be a standards based black box approach, where, say, both Intel and AMD would agree to optimize for performance/price a black box processor with predefined standards. Same for OS's. Of course nobody would agree to that. |
#23
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Kevin Lawton wrote:
I don't think there is much profit made out of drivers, though. Except the hardware sales. I chose an epson printer rather than another canon (I've owned several) because of the crappy linux support with canon products. This cost canon the sale of a $400 photo printer not helping with linux drivers for their products! -- Stacey |
#24
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"Del Cecchi" writes:
When I look at the brochure for the x450 and x455, it says "Supports Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition " These are IA64 boxes. Is that XP? It is XP's successor. Don't you just love vendor version numbering? I am especially fond of "HP-UX 11i version 2" (aka HP-UX 11.23). Cheers, -- In order to understand recursion you must first understand recursion. Remove /-nsp/ for email. |
#25
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"Stephen Sprunk" wrote in message .. . "GreyCloud" wrote in message ... The porting was by DEC. DEC had to pay for the whole port. Trouble was, NT couldn't compete against OpenVMS and TRU64 UNIX on the Alpha. Not enough features and pretty rough around the edges. DEC dropped developement for M$. M$ let the other vendors do the port of NT to their perspective platforms. When the vendors finally woke up, they dropped NT. Were there any platforms besides i386, Alpha, and MIPS? The RISC line that SGI line was using I think for a while. I do know that SGI tried to push NT under their namebrand of X86 for a period, but it brought them nothing but a bad name out of it. OpenVMS has been ported successfully to the Itanium2 processor as well as TRU-64 UNIX. Whether HP keeps tru-64 unix is another question tho. I don't see why HP would continue supporting Tru64 if they've already got a commitment to HP-UX on IA64. Also, HP appears to be putting some level of support into Linux and GCC -- at least on IA64. How many different unix flavors can a single vendor realistically ship and support? Good point and one that is good to take to the bank. I only see it being supported under the current federal contracts... but after that I suspect its the axe for tru64. When M$ has ported XP to the Itanium2 isn't known here nor have I seen any ads on M$ website about it. Windows Server 2003 has been ported to IA64. Whether XP was ported or not is now moot. Most of the old DEC line uses Apache now anyway. If there is a mass produced IA64 for public use, XP maybe only able to compete if the price is real low. Other than that windows can't compete against OpenVMS on the IA64. |
#26
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In comp.arch Peter Köhlmann wrote:
David Magda wrote: (Tim Shoppa) writes: Set your wayback machine to the early-mid-90's and remember that Microsoft sold Windows NT for a 64-bit platform (Alpha) before. Rumors have it that other RISC platforms were targets back then [...] Actually it ran on PowerPC and MIPS as well, if I remember correctly. This was NT 3.5(1) and maybe 4.0. It's one of the reasons why NT has/had a hardware abstraction layer (HAL). It did not run under NT4. And the Alpha-version ran in 32-bit mode I have a Finnish-language OEM NT4 CD that contains versions for Alpha, i386, MIPS and PPC. By contrast, the service pack 4 CD enclosed in the same package supports only the Alpha and i386 versions. -a |
#27
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On Fri, 09 Jan 2004 03:47:06 +0000, Bogdan wrote:
chrisv wrote: You can't tell me it would take all THAT much manpower for a company like ATI to compile their drivers for the half-dozen or so leading Linux distributions. It does take THAT much manpower and more. Sorry, I don't understand how. They've done the driver in source code already. They've written insructions on how to compile the kernel modules. How much of the end-user's time do they expect this whole process to take? An hour? That seems to be the maximum reasonable time to expect an end-user to take to get a dang driver installed. Now, how much time would it take for someone who really knew what they were doing, because they worked with these drivers for a living? I would expect a half-hour TOPS. Now, you multiply that by a half-dozen distributions, maybe double it again for the two most recent versions of XFree, and you have like ONE DAY of an engineer's time. What am I missing? And even if my time estimates are unrealistic, it's sure a hell of a lot easier for them to do it, ONCE for each distro/XFree, rather than asking thousands of end-users to make the individual effort. I'm the customer, ATI. I'm the guy with the money that YOU want. Make some effort to help me out! |
#28
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On Thu, 08 Jan 2004 17:05:04 +0100, Bernd Paysan wrote:
I don't know what problems you'll have with ATI cards and Linux (up to now, I've mainly use nVidia cards, and a Matrox card), but if you go to http:/ www.ati.com/support/faq/linux.html, you'll see that ATI does support Linux, and does provide proprietary binary drivers on http://mirror.ati.com support/driver.html. These did not work. The install failed and the messages told me that I had to compile kernel modules (using MD9.2). Googling, I found that others were getting the same error messages that I was. |
#29
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"Tony Hill" wrote in message .com... FWIW at least in theory WinNT was designed to be very portable. The entire system was built with a hardware abstraction layer that was supposed to minimize the amount of architecture-specific code. Now, I'm not sure just how successful this attempt was, but the basis is there. At various times NT was reported to have been running on PowerPC and MIPS in addition to the Alpha, i386 and IA-64 instruction sets that it was officially released for. Combined with the upcoming AMD64 port that makes for a fairly impressive array of architectures, though several of them were stillborn. My first NT box was a MIPS based DEC 5000 (or some such thing) prior to Alpha being done (I was investigating graphics support for Alpha/NT). A DEC group in Seattle (DECWest) did the work as far as I remember. At the first NT developers conference, I recall that they made a lot of noise about how NT was designed to be portable across architectures. Much later on, in connection with some console firmware research - I noted that OpenBoot had a "thin veneer" implementation of the "BIOS" interfaces that allowed NT to boot on Alpha which apaprently had been used for PowerPC (again IIRC froma hazy memory). The basic problem really is that the Windows market is a shrink wrap SW market. Despite interesting things like FX!32, other architectures just had no real advantage unless SW vendors (including Microsoft!) would provide native implementations of their apps. |
#30
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chrisv wrote:
On Fri, 09 Jan 2004 03:47:06 +0000, Bogdan wrote: chrisv wrote: You can't tell me it would take all THAT much manpower for a company like ATI to compile their drivers for the half-dozen or so leading Linux distributions. It does take THAT much manpower and more. Sorry, I don't understand how. They've done the driver in source code already. They've written insructions on how to compile the kernel modules. How much of the end-user's time do they expect this whole process to take? An hour? That seems to be the maximum reasonable time to expect an end-user to take to get a dang driver installed. Now, how much time would it take for someone who really knew what they were doing, because they worked with these drivers for a living? I would expect a half-hour TOPS. Now, you multiply that by a half-dozen distributions, maybe double it again for the two most recent versions of XFree, and you have like ONE DAY of an engineer's time. What am I missing? And even if my time estimates are unrealistic, it's sure a hell of a lot easier for them to do it, ONCE for each distro/XFree, rather than asking thousands of end-users to make the individual effort. I'm the customer, ATI. I'm the guy with the money that YOU want. Make some effort to help me out! Adapting drivers to the quirks of various systems is non-trivial, so I don't blame them for not issuing multiple versions. However all manufacturers of anything should be publishing their complete interface specification, timing requirements, etc. so that anyone can build an accurate driver. This doesn't even require that they publish the source to their own drivers, although doing so would probably be helpful to both sales and the public, not to mention driver quality. For all you know a part of the driver may be required to upload a program in goombah machine code to the device to launch it. That may save a ROM, or ease modification, and the reluctance to publish is because that goombah code exposes trade secrets. -- Chuck F ) ) Available for consulting/temporary embedded and systems. http://cbfalconer.home.att.net USE worldnet address! |
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