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I think Linus is very focussed on the stuff he cares about, and that shows by his complaint about PAE, which is pretty invisible to use userland folk. > the pe

by xscott 7y ago

I think Linus is very focussed on the stuff he cares about, and that shows by his complaint about PAE, which is pretty invisible to use userland folk. > the people who actually buy Intel kit basically want a faster 8088/80386/Pentium My company is small fries compared to most folks, but what we really wanted at the time was cheaper DEC Alphas.

kjs3 7y ago
I think Linus is very focussed on the stuff he cares about I think he'd be the first to agree with that. PAE, which is pretty invisible to use userland folk Perhaps, but the original conversation is about architecture, and PAE was a pretty grungy architectural wart, and the sort of thing that's very visible to the OS folks (as you say, what Linus cares about). we really wanted at the time was cheaper DEC Alphas There were 'cheap' Alphas: the 21066/21068 like in the Multia. But they were dogs; to be cheap, they had to give up big cache and wide paths to main memory. Expensive system support level stuff was required for fast Alphas (complex support chipsets, 128-bit wide (later 256-bit) memory buses). More commodity inertia would have fixed that over time, but they never got there. Intel on the other hand was way down the road reaping commodity benefits, and it ran the software commodity folks wanted.
- xscott 7y ago
  > Perhaps, but the original conversation is about architecture, and PAE was a pretty grungy architectural wart, and the sort of thing that's very visible to the OS folks (as you say, what Linus cares about). I suspect if he was into writing compilers (or graphics, or numerics, or ...), some of the other grungy architectural warts of x86 might annoy him too.
  - kjs3 7y ago
    I suspect if you read the linked thread, you'd see exactly what he thought. He was at Transmeta at the time, and isn't exactly unfamiliar with what compiler writers get annoyed with. You may or may not agree with what he says, but he has a cogent, interesting perspective.
    - xscott 7y ago
      Ahh, I only read the one post. My bad.
      - xscott 7y ago
        Well, I read the rest of his comments. There are little tidbits which are good observations, but mostly I continue to think he just disregards things which aren't in his field of interest. If I was more cynical, I might think he wanted the continuance of x86 specifically because he was working at Transmeta.

by xscott 7y ago

kjs3 7y ago

I think Linus is very focussed on the stuff he cares about I think he'd be the first to agree with that. PAE, which is pretty invisible to use userland folk Perhaps, but the original conversation is about architecture, and PAE was a pretty grungy architectural wart, and the sort of thing that's very visible to the OS folks (as you say, what Linus cares about). we really wanted at the time was cheaper DEC Alphas There were 'cheap' Alphas: the 21066/21068 like in the Multia. But they were dogs; to be cheap, they had to give up big cache and wide paths to main memory. Expensive system support level stuff was required for fast Alphas (complex support chipsets, 128-bit wide (later 256-bit) memory buses). More commodity inertia would have fixed that over time, but they never got there. Intel on the other hand was way down the road reaping commodity benefits, and it ran the software commodity folks wanted.

xscott 7y ago
> Perhaps, but the original conversation is about architecture, and PAE was a pretty grungy architectural wart, and the sort of thing that's very visible to the OS folks (as you say, what Linus cares about). I suspect if he was into writing compilers (or graphics, or numerics, or ...), some of the other grungy architectural warts of x86 might annoy him too.
- kjs3 7y ago
  I suspect if you read the linked thread, you'd see exactly what he thought. He was at Transmeta at the time, and isn't exactly unfamiliar with what compiler writers get annoyed with. You may or may not agree with what he says, but he has a cogent, interesting perspective.
  - xscott 7y ago
    Ahh, I only read the one post. My bad.
    - xscott 7y ago
      Well, I read the rest of his comments. There are little tidbits which are good observations, but mostly I continue to think he just disregards things which aren't in his field of interest. If I was more cynical, I might think he wanted the continuance of x86 specifically because he was working at Transmeta.