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Red Hat Software AI Cloud Linux

Red Hat CEO: Linux Is Now The 'Default Choice' For The Cloud (bizjournals.com) 89

Posted by EditorDavid from the cloudy-with-a-chance-of-Linux dept.
Speaking at the "All Things Open" conference, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst remembered when Linux "was just a 'bunch of geeks' getting together figuring it all out on an 8286 chip" 25 years ago. An anonymous reader quotes BizJournals: "It went from being kind of a hacker movement to truly what I'll say [is] a viable alternative to traditional software," Whitehurst says, adding that Red Hat was a part of that push. Over the years, it came out from under the radar, being what Whitehurst calls "the default choice for a next-generation of infrastructure," particularly when it comes to cloud architectures... He points to Google, Microsoft and Facebook, all having open sourced their machine learning systems. "They recognize the company that builds the community around that piece of technology, that technology is going to win."
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Red Hat CEO: Linux Is Now The 'Default Choice' For The Cloud More

Red Hat CEO: Linux Is Now The 'Default Choice' For The Cloud

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  • 8286 chip (Score:5, Informative)

    by Spazmania ( 174582 ) on Sunday October 30, 2016 @12:37PM (#53179111) Homepage

    First off, that's 80286. Missed a zero there.

    Second off, that's wrong. Linux needed an 80386sx as its minimum supported CPU.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

      I agree - the 80286 was too weak for Linux - lacking some essential instructions.

      I think it was not until recently the kernel got upgraded to no longer support the 80386.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jelle ( 14827 )

        Specifically, the 80386 was the first 32-bit processor. The 80286 was a 16-bit processor, with a way to actually address up to 16MByte of memory, which went into the IBM PC AT [wikipedia.org].

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bored ( 40072 )

        The 286 didn't have paging...

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by sootman ( 158191 )

      Came here to say this. FROM THE FIRST FREAKING SENTENCE OF ORIGINAL FREAKING ANNOUNCEMENT... [google.com]

      Hello everybody out there using minix -
      I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.

      And near the end...

      It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc)

      Things have changed since then, but 386 was a requirement since literally day one.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mark-t ( 151149 )
        I forgot about that bit. Didn't the lack of flat memory model played a role too?

        • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

          "Acceptance [of 286 protected mode] was additionally hampered by the fact that the 286 only allowed memory access in 16 bit segments via each of four segment registers, meaning only 4*216 bytes, equivalent to 256 kilobytes, could be accessed at a time.[11] "

          So that's correct: no flat memory model in the 286. 386 protected mode switched the memory bus and segment size to 32 bits, allowing 4gigs to be accessed at once.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Zeio ( 325157 )

      Thanks for catching this so quickly. I wanted to say exactly this. I believe torvalds originally called the kernel a 386 assembly task switcher. So I am surprised someone some redhat claimed Linux on the 286. Tech history is easy to forget but as someone who has been excited about our tech world because of the short collective memory and lack of history and perspective a lot of mistakes get repeated even by very smart folks.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nyet ( 19118 )

      CEOs are paid handsomely to get things wrong pretty much all of the time whenever they open their fat stupid mouths.

      Idiots, all of them.

    • If /. didn't outsource so much of its editing to Thirdworldistan, the 80286 mis-transcription would have been caught.

      It's one of the reasons I've gone from visiting several times a day to maybe every other week.

      • In fairness, the slashdot submitter was exactly quoting Lauren Ohnesorge of the Triangle Business Journal who listened to a speech where the speaker said, "eighty two eighty-six" and thought he said "eighty-two eighty-six." Could have stood the addition of a "[sic]" if the editors were sharper.

        Why Red Hat's Jim Whitehurst thought Linux ever ran on an 80286 is more a mystery.

  • Will this be the year of Linux on the desktop?

    • I think we pretty much got that with Android Tablets(*). Android (while creating some new issues) did solve a lot that plagued Linux Desktop. Take a flavor of Android, from different manufacturers, across a wide range of versions, download an APK and it works. Play Store providing a better environment to do that.

      No end user is expected to have to type in "Sudo apt-get make and make-install" and manually solve dependency issues.

      No end user is expected to solve driver issues.

      For the majority of tasks people d

  • Oh please (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Sunday October 30, 2016 @12:40PM (#53179125)

    Company head says my company is the leader in current buzzword-hype-technology.

    Is there really nothing going on right now that we use that as "news"?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bmo ( 77928 )

      "Company head says my company is the leader in current buzzword-hype-technology."

      indeed.

      If RH is so great for "the cloud" why does Google use a modified version of Ubuntu in-house on their servers?

      RH management seems to be getting more psychopathic over the years.

      --
      BMO

      • They have a lot of servers and it's more cost effective to come up with their own solution for management, monitoring, maintanance, etc?
        You can't exactly wait for a kernel patch or a fix for a breaking change if you're working with over a million servers.
        Also to get bang for your buck You need your programs with a lot of patches to make them fit for your specific requirements and stripped of any code that goes unused or is deemed a security risk which means a whole lot of packages that are compiled in-hou

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        If RH is so great for "the cloud" why does Google use a modified version of Ubuntu in-house on their servers?

        RH's CEO says that Linux is the "default choice" for "The Cloud". Google uses Linux for their servers. It seems that you don't realise it, but you are agreeing with Red Hat's CEO.

  • Red Hat CEO: "Open is the default choice" (Score:3, Funny)

    by SolemnLord ( 775377 ) on Sunday October 30, 2016 @12:50PM (#53179183)

    Slashdot headline: "Linux is the default choice".

    There's... sort of a significant gap between the two.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I haven't seen a gap that big since goatse.

  • Of course it is. Because only a complete moron would use Windoze on a server, and unfortunately Apple got out of the server game.

    So Linux isn't just the default choice, it's the only choice.

  • I mean they offer cloud installs of RHEL, but few will be clicking that button.

  • Secure boot and shoddy BIOS make Linux on a lot of PC's hard to utilize. If you can access the cloud someway however then it's ok.
  • I used to like both Linux and BSD very much. Then systemd hits Linux and now I only use OpenBSD. Besides, Linux has become something of kludge.and it is less secure now than it was.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • What were they expecting Windows? I don't know enough to comment on BSD but other than that, what are the other options? I would generally consider anything but linux in a cloud environment to be some terrible terrible marketing experiment in progress where some OS company bribed a bunch of users to use the stupid solution they were offering. Then expect to see those companies either fail because of their stupid choice, or switch and talk about how stupid their choice had been.

  • If you are going to expand and contract instances based on demand you aren't going to spring for a bunch of proprietary server licensing.

    Rather than have to predict your maximum load ahead of time or have licenses sitting on the shelf you just run Linux and don't worry about it at all.

  • Regardless of what I hope are typos in the summary, I recently attended a 'cloud debate'. Of course, one of the groups there was for Azure of Microsoft fame and they had I believe the Open Source director as one of the two representing Azure.

    One of the things that stuck out during the debate was that he openly admit that initially, Windows instances easily made up over 70% of all instances launched in Azure BUT in the last 2 odd years, this number has flipped and Linux now represents 70% of the new instance

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