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Re: They Took Way Too Long To Port It
Personal view, so no [AH] tag or anything:
The Linux kernel is an extremely rapidly moving target. It has well over 450 and nearly 500 syscalls. It comprises some 20 million lines of code.
It needs constant updating and the problem is so severe that there are multiple implementations of live in-memory patching so you can do it between reboots.
Meanwhile, VMSclusters can have uptimes in decades and you can cluster VAXen to Alphas to Itanium boxes and now to x86-64 boxes, move workloads from one to another using CPU emulation if needed, and shut down old nodes, and so you could in principle take a DECnet cluster of late-1980s VAXes and gradually migrate it to a rack of x86 boxes clustered over TCP/IP without a single moment of downtime.
Linux is just about the worst possible fit for this I can imagine.
It has no built-in clustering in the kernel and virtually no support for filesystem sharing in the kernel itself.
It is, pardon the phrase, as much use as a chocolate teapot for this stuff.
VMS is a newer and more capable OS than traditional UNIX. I know Unix folks like to imagine it's some eternal state of the art, but it's not. It's a late-1960s OS for standalone minicomputers. Linux is a modernised clone of a laughably outdated design.
VMS is a late 1970s OS for networked and clustered minicomputers. It's still old fashioned but it has strengths and extraordinary resilience and uptimes is one of them.
Re: Linux needs constant updating
Yeah, no. To refute a few points:
Remember, there are LTS versions with lifetimes measured in years.
Point missed error. "This is a single point release! We are now on 4.42.16777216." You still have to update it. Even if with some fugly livepatch hack.
And nobody ever ran VMSclusters with uptimes measured in years
Citation: 10 year cluster uptime.
https://www.osnews.com/story/13245/openvms-cluster-achieves-10-year-uptime/
Citation: 16 year cluster uptime.
Linux “clusters” scale to supercomputers with millions of interconnected nodes.
Point missed. Linux clusters are by definition extremely loosely clustered. VMSclusters are a tight/close cluster model where it can be non-obvious which node you are even attached to.
Linus Torvalds used VMS for a while, and hated it
I find it tends to be what you're used to or enounter first.
I met VMS before Unix -- and very nearly before Windows existed at all -- and I preferred it. I still hate the terse little commands and the cryptic glob expansion and the regexes and all this cultural baggage.
I am not alone.
UNIX became popular because it did so many things so much more logically
I call BS. This is the same as the bogus "it's intuitive" claim. Intuitive means "what I got to know first." Douglas Adams nailed it.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/39828-i-ve-come-up-with-a-set-of-rules-that-describe
Thinks of why Windows nowadays is at an evolutionary dead end
Linux is a dead end too. Unix in general is. We should have gone with Plan 9, and we still should.
