[rescue] SMP on intel wasteful?

[Patrick Giagnocavo +1.717.201.3366]

On Mon, Jun 24, 2002 at 08:56:26PM -0400, Michael Schiller wrote:
> "Patrick Giagnocavo +1.717.201.3366" wrote:
> 
> > Absolutely.  If IRIX was as secure out of the box as OpenBSD, I would
> > have nothing but SGI stuff.
> >
> 
> I'm sorry, but am I missing something here? I've heard lots of people
> complaining about how secure various OSes (IRIX, Solaris, etc.) are 'out of the
> box'. Who cares? 

If you don't make any more money and have to spend more time on it,
you would care.  The customers don't understand security and expect it
to be there as part of the base service.

> How long does it take to secure any modern Unix OS? I mean,
> just because an OS comes out of it's box in a more secure state than another
> does NOT make it a better os!

It has the capability of making it a more secure OS however.  Note
that above I write "If IRIX was as secure out of the box as OpenBSD" -
I don't say anything about relative quality; there are things IRIX has
that OpenBSD does not - such as XFS, SMP support, sproc based threads
and "normal" threads, etc.  

OpenBSD's thread implementation is so lame that I can't run a needed
application on SPARC32 (and probably not SPARC64 either and must
resort to using x86 hardware.)

Cordially

Patrick Giagnocavo
patrick at zill.net