Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!batcomputer!itsgw!steinmetz!dawn!stpeters From: stpeters@dawn.steinmetz Newsgroups: comp.windows.x Subject: Re: A Thought on X Terminals Message-ID: <13216@steinmetz.ge.com> Date: 21 Feb 89 19:30:36 GMT References: <19613@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <611@gt-eedsp.UUCP> <4921@xenna.Encore.COM> Sender: news@steinmetz.ge.com Reply-To: dawn!stpeters@steinmetz.UUCP () Distribution: comp Organization: GE Corporate R&D, Schenectady, NY Lines: 44 In article <4921@xenna.Encore.COM> bzs@Encore.COM (Barry Shein) writes: >Yes, but you're falling into the standard "diskless workstation" >fallacy, that the disk behind that diskless is not going to cost >anything. In fact you usually need around 24MB of disk, at least, just >to boot the thing (8MB root, 16MB swap), if you need to support even a >dozen users you better throw in the price of a server also so suddenly >you've easily eaten an additional $50K of hardware, or once again the >price of the workstations. Barry, now you've fallen into a fallacy: pulling numbers from yesterday's technology to argue a point about tomorrow's. My diskless Sun has all of 2.9MB "in" it's root partition - "in" in quotes because its root "partition" is an NFS-mounted directory on the server. On the server, the "root directories" of all the clients are in a single partition. All the client vmunix's can be - on the server - hard links to the same file. Pull the same trick on most of the other root filesystem files, and an indefinite number of client roots take up only about 3MB on your server. Excluding client /tmp directories, of course. However, 1) they too can share common space on the server, and 2) if the diskless node is to be used as just a windowing terminal, it doesn't (or shouldn't) need a /tmp. SunOS 4.0 does require that the server have a fixed-size swap file for each client, but I'd bet that restriction doesn't last. Anyway, a diskless client used just as a windowing terminal doesn't need 16MB swap. In fact, it shouldn't need any swap at all. If a windowing terminal doesn't swap, why should a diskless client used as one swap? Suppose tomorrow's OS release supports a config option: option NOVIRTUAL_MEMORY Then we will have a machine that runs UNIX, has no disk, and needs server access only for boots or fonts. Hundreds of them could go on one server and use but a handful of MB. And, of course, you could always use them as real workstations if your needs change. -- Dick St.Peters GE Corporate R&D, Schenectady, NY stpeters@ge-crd.arpa uunet!steinmetz!stpeters