Mastodawn

During production of Finding Nemo, we started using Linux boxes in addition to SGIs.
Why?

3D painting software we wrote for laying out coral was written in C++ using templates, and the debug info was too large for IRIX, but was debuggable on Linux.

Was this a 32 bit vs. 64 bit issue?

No.

IRIX reserved half the address space for the kernel, while Linux only did a quarter.

So on Linux, we had 3GB, and the symbols fit.

It was a 32 bit show, both machines had 4GB max.

Plenty for Finding Nemo.

Show thread

scrottie (he/him/them)

I worked with someone (after the fact) who worked at Warner Bros as a sysadmin and had a story of running around the animation studio stealing people's SGI Fuels or whatever to use as webservers when the QuickTime preview clips they posted (unexpectedly) generated so much traffic that it took out the Linux webserver farm. I don't know what that means other than that might have been the last time IRIX made any significant appearance in web hosting. Also sick to death of stuff crashing. I worked at one large hosting company, and Linux crashed a lot. Windows is more stable by a wide margin. FreeBSD and BSDi were bombproof but BSDi went out of business and FreeBSD never recovered from kernel threads and losing their lead dev to Apple. IRIX was insane like all of the proprietary Unices back then went insane in their own way, but damn was it solid.