Re: Zashto Linux e po-dobyr ot UNIX i MS? / Компютри и Интернет / UNIX

In response to:

Large enterprises should not use Linux because it is not secure enough, has scalability problems and could fork into many different flavours, according to the Agility Alliance, which includes IT heavyweights EDS, Fuji Xerox, Cisco, Microsoft, Sun, Dell and EMC.

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Insecure: Linux has three role-based security mechanisms and mandatory access controls (SE-Linux is just the one included), three ACL mechanisms (Trustees, POSIX ACLs and SGI's XFS security mechanisms), an EAL4 rating with an EAL5 possibly underway, USB or dongle system locking, support for cryptographic and "trusted" hardware, support for IPSec, a very impressive packet filtering system (layers 2, 3 and 7), capabilities and that's just the kernel. If you want to include the rest of the system, you've stack guards, SSL/TLS, Kerberos 5, rootkit detectors, binary modification detectors, TCP wrappers, bayesian intrusion detection systems, root jails, virtualization (which allows you to compartmentalize, and therefore can be used for security), MD5 passwords for the shadow suite, one-time password systems, public key encryption and a host of validation & security auditing tools (TARA, SARA, NMap, Nessus, BASS, etc)

Unscalable: The Linux kernel supports "pure" SMP systems that are respectably large. For larger system, bproc and OpenMOSIX permit scaling up to about 65534 nodes with each node taking perhaps 64 processors. To my way of thinking, that's pretty damn scalable. Actually, as bproc and OpenMOSIX use different migration systems, it may be possible to build a grid of grids, where you've a Beowulf cluster of MOSIX clusters of 64-way SMP nodes. This gives you a theoretical capacity of 274,861,129,984 processors. Microsoft is planning to add clustering, in the future. Let me know when it compares. Linux also supports NUMA, Distributed Shared Memory, Active Ports/Active Messages, gigabit MPI, high-speed network filesystems (Lustre!) abd other key components for scaling. See "first few entries in top 500 supercomputers" for further information.

Prone to forking: There are many Linux distributions, tailored to people's needs, but only one real "kernel". There are many Windows kernels (the 3.x tree, the 9x tree, the NT tree, the 200x tree, Windows CE, Longhorn) but the distributions are basically the same components. Who is creating more of a fork - the tailor who makes clothes that fit from standard material, or the tailor who uses the closest material to hand, regardless of what it is?