Linux jyrää !!!!

mie kirjoitti:

Huippuleffat kuten the time machine,supernova,what dreams may come,tightrope,apollo 13,true lies jne.. niiden efektit on tehty linuxsilla...


Linux fulfilled the task very well. It handled every job we threw at it. During our testing phase, we used its ability to emulate Digital UNIX applications to benchmark standard applications and show that its performance would meet our needs. The flexibility of the existing devices and available source code gave Linux a definitive advantage.


The downside of Linux was the engineering effort required to support it. We knew that we would need to dedicate one engineer to support these systems during their set up. Fortunately, we had engineers with significant previous experience with Linux on Intel systems (the author and other members of the system-administration staff) and enough Unix-system experience to make any required modifications. We carefully tested a variety of hardware to make sure all were completely compatible with Linux.


Numerology and Fate
The Linux distribution used was Red Hat 4.1. At that time Red Hat was shipping Linux 2.0.18, which didn't support the PC164 mainboard, so the first thing we had to do was upgrade the kernel. During our testing we tracked down a number of problems with devices and kept up with both the 2.0 and 2.1 series of kernels. We ended up sticking with 2.1.42 with a few patches. We also decided on the NCR 810 SCSI card with the BSD-based driver and the SMC 100MB Ethernet card with the de4x5 driver. It turned out to be a very stable configuration, but there was one serious floating-point problem that caused our water-rendering software to die with an unexpected floating-point exception.


This turned out to be a tricky problem to fix and didn't make it into the kernel sources until 2.0.31-pre5 and 2.1.43. The Alpha kernel contains code to catch floating-point exceptions and to handle them according to the IEEE standard. That code failed to handle one of the floating-point instructions that could generate an exception. As a result, when that case occurred, the application would exit with a floating-point exception. Once fixed, our applications ran quite smoothly on the Alpha systems.


!!!!!! LOPPUTULOS !!!!!!


Conclusion
The Linux systems worked incredibly well for our problems. The cost benefit was overwhelmingly positive even including the engineering resources we devoted to the problems. The Alpha Linux turned out to be slightly more difficult than first expected, but the state of Alpha Linux is improving very rapidly and should be substantially better now.


Digital Domain will continue to improve and expand the tools we have available on these systems. We are engendering the development of more commercial and in-house applications available on Linux. We are requesting that vendors port their applications and libraries. At this time, the Linux systems are only used for batch processing, but we expect our compositing software to be used interactively by our digital artists. This software does not require dedicated acceleration hardware, and the speed provided by the Alpha processor is a great benefit to productivity.


Feature film and television visual effects development has provided a high-performance, cost-sensitive, proving ground for Linux. We believe that the general purpose nature of the platform coupled with commodity pricing gives it wide application in areas outside our industry. The low entry cost, versatility and interoperability of Linux is sufficiently attractive to warrant more extensive investigation, experimentation and deployment. We are currently at the forefront of that development within our industry and hope to be joined shortly by our peers.


Tekijänä toimi
http://www.digitaldomain.com/

kirjoitti:

Anonyymi

Kirjoita kommentti

5000

Lähetä