Friday, March 27, 2020

UNIX and Linux A Heritage of Design Scalability

UNIX was always designed to be scalable. In the early days, Linux ran on a PDP-11 minicomputer by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Later, DEC branded its own version of the UNIX OS as Ultrix. Ultrix ran the Atex application, which was newsroom editing software for almost every major newspaper in the world. Atex was the publishing system to beat all publishing systems.

But it wasn’t until Linux came along that both went down to nanoscale operating systems. The smallest computer I have ever developed with using Linux was the Intel Edison board, a postage stamp-sized multi-core Atom processor with several co-processors and plenty of input/output (I/O) pins.

Another credit card-sized computer is the BeagleBone PocketBeagle, a credit card-sized computer has low power consumption, plenty of I/O and high-resolution graphics driven by a USB port for power.

Going a little larger, we have the Raspberry Pi and Tinker Board computers, slightly larger than a credit card.

On the larger side of embedded Linux systems would be the NVIDIA Jetson NANO boards. These boards are touted for artificial intelligence (AI) applications and have multiple parallel processors for high-speed processing.

But today, new Linux systems are emerging that are ARM processor-based servers. Rack mounted or stand alone, these systems are high powered and used for enterprise applications.

On the largest end of the scale is the IBM Z-Series mainframe series. Linux runs on the Z-series using the s390x architecture.
How Scalable Is Linux?

It would be easier to count the processor architectures that Linux doesn’t run on than provide a list of all the architectures that it does work on. As of this publication, 31 different processors are currently supported for Linux. These architectures range from postage stamp-sized computers to mini-computers, and all the way up to the IBM Z-Series computers. Linux systems are scalable from computers that fit in your pocket to computers that require a full floor of a large building, and everything in-between.
More Info: what jobs can you get with an a+ certification

No comments:

Post a Comment