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Everyone is focusing on the desktop. I said this a few weeks ago, under the Linux distro comparison/contrast discussion: Linux, or what we loosely refer to as "Linux," is probably going to diverge along several lines of specialization, viz., desktop/workstation, server, embedded/portable devices. The one I left out last time was embedded devices, but that's clearly an emerging context for Linux. Witness Linus Torvald's involvement working for Transmeta, creating Mobile Linux. My main interest is in a workstation-cum-server for development and fun. I have that. The next version of GNOME and Enlightenment will be totally kick-ass, but I don't really need it. It's just nice to have. I agree with what people have been saying about the home user issues. There are definitely issues, and they definitely involve Linux. Without the applications, user-friendliness, eye-candy, etc., Linux is just a kernel. As seen in the original post in this thread, we tend to think of "Linux" the phenomenon or "Linux" the full distribution rather than Linux, the kernel. So anyway, for an enterprise server (instead of a bunch of throw-aways clustered into server farms), you need better threading than Linux has. Java is becoming the programming language of choice for enterprise applications. Any application server worth its salt has to have a Java servlet engine, JSP engine, and an EJB server/container. Java is inherently multi-threaded and when using native threads (a must on multi-CPUs and on production JVMs from Sun) it inherits the threading model of the OS it runs on. The "every thread is a process" model doesn't seem to scale under big time loads running multi-threaded apps. Two major problems are the algorithms used by the kernel scheduler, which wastes lots of time scheduling all these individual processes, and the related problem of a lack of a user-level threads library. Most major Unixen have adopted the many-to-many threading model. Linux may never because Linus and his cronies are dead set against the complexity of it. The savior may be something like Ralph Engelschall's GNU-threads. If the user-level threads can be implemented without modifying the kernel (or burdening the kernel developers too much), then it might happen. For an excellent article on this kernel/Java stuff there's one at IBM: http://www-4.ibm.com/software/developer/library/java2/index.html. I'm interested to see how Linux evolves to meet the next generation of server-side applications. It should be interesting. Scott Stirling West Newton, MA ----- Original Message ----- From: "Derek Martin" <dmartin at ne.arris-i.com> To: "gnhlug" <gnhlug at zk3.dec.com>; "BLU mailing list" <discuss at Blu.Org> Sent: Monday, January 31, 2000 8:31 AM Subject: The future of linux > > Having seen Linux go from little more than a fledgeling Unix-like > operating system that I could write my shell script homework on to a > well-supported OS that I now use for everything, including "desk-top" > applications like productivity apps, to games, to internet servers, to > [lots of more good stuff here], I wonder what people think is the > direction Linux will take from here, and what challenges it should be > prepared to face that it currently isn't. Comments anyone - Subcription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" on the first line of the message body to discuss-request at blu.org (Subject line is ignored).
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