Cover Story

Engineers Speak Out: Linux vs. Windows NT, Part 1 Few ISD editorials in recent memory have elicited stronger responses than "Why Most Engineers Insist on Unix." Here are some representative responses from readers. by Murry Shohat

In his editorial in the April issue, Editor-in-Chief Jonah McLeod discussed readers' comments on ISD's series of benchmarks and articles on Windows NT as an EDA platform (see the latest installment, "EDA Platform Benchmark: Synthesis"), which were generally highly critical. He raised the issue of why Intel would want to push a Microsoft operating system when a robust version of Unix--Linux--is available for the PC, and he concluded with a request for readers to e-mail their opinions.

As we suspected, most designers are adamant: They want their EDA tools to run under Unix. What's more, they say that Linux is technically excellent by every measure, and NT simply isn't. Painfully aware that technical excellence doesn't guarantee market share, many readers say that this time it should.

Tools for the design, verification, and simulation flows of deep and very deep submicron ICs are proliferating. The OS plays a critical role in productivity and product quality. If Linux and Unix are so robust and resilient, why are most EDA vendors launching their newest products with NT? Seeing how EDA is well established on Unix, any management planning to force a shift to NT ought to be just as concerned as we are about the sentiments expressed by our readers. However, they shouldn't forget that resistance to new tools may well be based on command line anxiety.

Our straw poll elicited a huge number of replies--a "broken water main of response," says Jonah, who dealt with the flood of e-mail. We're therefore presenting our report in two installments. This month, we offer a general overview and focus on OS reliability and productivity issues. Next month, we'll complete the discussion of productivity issues (EDA utilities and OS support) and explore economic questions.

Although readers' sentiments overwhelmingly backed Linux, we were impressed with the quality of the input--often heartfelt, occasionally funny--from both sides.

The battleground
Although Linux, a nearly bulletproof and much loved OS, with perhaps as many as 5 million users, works beautifully and tirelessly as a host environment, most EDA vendors resist porting their tools to it, favoring instead the heavily hyped Windows NT. Management seems to be leaning in the same direction. This is the problem facing Unix in general and Linux in particular.

Design engineers, the primary users of Linux, are resisting management's pressure to adapt to an NT world. Some engineers are even ready to go to the mat if forced to use NT: "I'll quit first" was offered more than once. Performance differences among competing hardware platforms are largely a thing of the past (see "EDA Platform Benchmark," March, as well as "EDA Platform Benchmark: Synthesis" of this issue). So why not pursue EDA flows on low-cost PCs? EDA vendors like Synopsys , Inc. of Mountain View, Calif., are porting their design tool portfolio to relatively cheap Intel architecture workstations running under Windows NT. Yet many EDA tool makers either have no plans to support Linux--which can run on the same systems--or, like Exemplar Logic, Inc. in Fremont, Calif., have canceled support for existing products ported to the Linux environment. (See the next installment for Exemplar's response.)

Is this course of action shortsighted? There's a good chance it is.

A small but important side note: Comments from readers were often accompanied by disclaimers relieving employers of responsibility for the opinions of their employees. Names "on the record" speak only for themselves unless otherwise indicated. Out of hundreds of readers' opinions, none was more telling than that of an Intel manager who asked to remain anonymous. Asked if his colleagues shared his pro-Linux bias, he replies, "They all feel that the Intel hardware can keep up" with workstations based on processors from other companies, "but get physically ill at the idea of actually designing a chip on NT."

So is EDA on NT a bad idea? The battle rages over these issues:

• Reliability and resilience: the number of hours, days, weeks, or months without a fatal system crash

• Productivity: a subjective measure of work performed in a given unit of time

• Technical support: measured by human contact (e-mail included) and short-order bug fixes

• Utilities: a bulwark of Unix, though not unknown to NT

• Performance: "My $3,000 Pentium II beats your UltraSPARC, but give me an Alpha"

• Economics: expressed in hard dollars for specific hardware and software

• Management attitudes: too often dismissed as misguided or worse

• T departments: often seen as the real enemy because they're said to "force" management to impose NT on design engineers

Covering the bases
David Skoll, a project leader at Chipworks, Inc., Ottawa, covers most bases with a well-structured commentary, wishing "to discuss nontechnical reasons explaining why Linux is better than NT--in fact, why the widespread adoption of NT for EDA will greatly harm the electronic design community."

"NT is expensive," he begins. "Microsoft sells most server packages with per-client licenses, so a legitimately licensed Exchange server with e-mail for 100 users is very costly. Linux provides superior functionality free. Linux apps like Sendmail and Netscape have no per-client licenses.

"Moreover, Windows NT is proprietary. So are commercial versions of Unix, but they adhere to vendor-independent standards promoted by Posix, ISO, the Open Group, and so forth. That has a very important effect: Solaris, for example, can coexist easily on a network with HP-UX, Digital Unix, or AIX. Vendor-independent standards ensure that vendors provide value. If they don't, customers can switch with relatively little difficulty.

"Linux is even more accessible than commercial flavors of Unix. There are multiple sources for obtaining Linux and Linux support. That means that Linux vendors must work hard to keep customers happy or they'll switch. In contrast, NT is a single-sourced system. If you're unhappy with Microsoft or its support, you're stuck. There are no closely compatible systems available as alternatives, and no third-party vendors who meaningfully support NT. Your entire EDA enterprise is at the mercy of a single supplier.

"Although designers know the folly of single-sourced parts, managers seem to ignore the folly of single-sourced software systems. If NT ever does dominate EDA, we'll all suffer. The EDA market will represent a tiny portion of NT sales, so Microsoft will have little incentive to provide service or value to EDA customers."

"NT is an immature, unproven system," he continues. "The Windows API has changed radically in the last few years. Even the user interface has been completely reworked. Unix, on the other hand, is a proven, stable design with almost 30 years of use in cutting-edge operations.

"NT has more office suites and productivity apps than Linux, but is that really a selling point? Do we want engineers to do design or to make Powerpoint presentations? In any case, if presentations are important, there are several office suites for Unix!

"Many EDA vendors are porting their software to NT but not to Linux. That's completely irrational. A porting effort from Solaris to Linux involves a recompilation, but a port to NT is a major undertaking. Even if EDA vendors don't expect high Linux sales, the incremental cost of offering a Linux version of Unix software is so small that it's foolish not to do so."

Echoing that sentiment, Mattias Zhabinskiy, a system administrator at Transwitch Corp., Shelton, Conn., who works on VLSI design for telecom applications, says he fails to understand why CAD tool companies don't port to Linux. "I'm sure it wouldn't take more than two or three months. Linux runs on Intel, SPARC, Alpha, PowerPC, SGI, Mac, Amiga--even the Palmpilot. So when an EDA tool is ported to Linux, it can run on all this hardware, including relatively low-cost 600-MHz PCI-based Alpha machines and on PowerPC machines."

Transwitch has several Intel systems running Linux to develop software and firmware. "Linux is extremely robust and very nicely integrated in our computing environment," Zhabinskiy insists. "All of us--including management--would love to have all tools running on Linux. It would save a lot of money on hardware, and we'd preserve the software and working environment developed in-house."

Linux envy may be a side effect for some engineers who've moved to NT. Lengyel Sandor, design engineer for Topaz Technologies, Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif., uses Linux at home and NT at work. "I love Synopsys . I'm happy they'll provide their software on NT. However, I'd be even happier if they'd also provide it on Linux. That would make Linux a serious contender in the future for engineering workstations," he comments.

However, performance and features could be lost if everyone tried to switch their various Unix environments to Linux, warns Harry McKee, an engineer at Cascade Engineering Services, Bellevue, Wash., on assignment at Qualcomm, Inc. in San Diego. "Not all applications are available for Linux. Some that are freely available also have lower performance in certain areas. There are many trade-offs in time, money, and performance, and they give different platforms different advantages."

"My PC running NT 4 crashes when I have only e-mail and browser tools running--even when I'm not actively using them--and I have plenty of RAM!" says Steven Paluzzi, senior CAE tools engineer at Picturetel.

Like many others, McKee uses Linux at home. The benefits, he says, include "only one computer on my desk, the ability to dual-boot into Windows, familiar development tools, and cost-effectiveness. In a field in which it's important to have access to source code and not be dependent on custom solutions, Microsoft is an incredibly expensive option. Some of our software is based on freely available source code programs like Perl, SWIG, and Apache--all very dependable. It's unfortunate that commercial vendors fail to see the possibilities." But Robert Wikander, a computer engineering student at Sweden's Luleå University of Technology, is ambivalent. "I'm in the new batch of designers who can actually choose between NT and Unix. What choice will I make? Usually, tools running on NT have a more consistent look and feel. To some extent, that gives NT an edge. Though most companies use Motif on the Unix side, it still has small but very annoying differences."

"We're using Cadence 4.4.1 with 0.6-µm technology, running on SunOS machines," he continues. "Sometimes it feels as though Cadence were a graphical user interface running on top of a command-type Unix. The Cadence tools aren't easy to master. I don't know if they'd be easier on Windows NT. If they were, I think people would start using NT instead of Unix variations."

Doug Hahn of Nvidia Corp., Sunnyvale, Calif., is pragmatic about using NT for EDA. "You just end up porting Unix tools to NT," he writes. "Of course, some tools don't have NT versions or the NT versions aren't as stable. That will change as more and more engineers are forced onto NT. They'll have to adapt to the environment to survive. In the end, you get a hobbled work environment."

"I don't need Microsoft to determine what my user experience will be. I use tools that keep me productive," he says. "It's much more difficult to tailor major portions of the 'look and feel' of an OS like Windows, whose major focus is to prevent lowest-common-denominator users from shooting themselves in the foot."

"The stability of Windows NT can't be compared with that of any version of Unix, especially Linux; there is simply no contest," says Javan Gargus, an engineering student at the University of Alberta who has done some design work.

Another reader argues that Linux offers the best performance on Intel-based systems--"much better than what you'd get from NT," reports a "dark elf" at Darkelf Network, a nonprofit organization providing Web and Netscape hosting. Furthermore, he or she says, "When running Linux, I don't fear that the OS will crash." Chris Gori, an engineer at a top-tier network equipment company in San Jose, seconds that thought. "There are plenty of documented Linux systems with 300-day uptimes--used day in, day out as mail, news, and Web servers. I challenge anyone to show me the last time an NT box lasted even a month without a reboot." Echoing that sentiment is Steven Paluzzi, senior CAE tools engineer at Picturetel Corp., Andover, Mass. "My PC running NT 4 occasionally crashes when I have only e-mail and browser tools running--even when I'm not actively using them--and I have plenty of RAM!--never mind EDA tasks. Many hardware designers become Unix experts through experience, trial and error, and the will and ability to explore. I know of no design engineers becoming self-made NT experts. Engineers tend to decline the challenge to delve into Windows problems, probably because they're seen as nearly impossible to solve," he reports.

Gregory Wright, a technical staff member in the Wireless Technology Research Department at Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, N.J., says, "I'd use Linux any day instead of NT. The reliability is superb; my Linux machines stay up for weeks at a time. The performance and value are outstanding: I have a 600-MHz Alpha machine with 512 Mbytes of RAM. It cost less than $9,000. If I need a simple tool I can often find it free on the Net, ready to run under Linux."

Outside the IC design community, Don Littlefield, computer technician at Philips Chemical Co., Pasadena, Texas, also believes that Linux is bulletproof. "The Internet proves the point. Up to 70 percent of Internet servers use Linux, with the Apache server program running the sites. Many of them run for years without rebooting. Besides, Linux and Apache are free. You get your technical support on the Internet. If you need new drivers, just ask for them on the news groups. With Linux, you can have it all--even the latest and greatest."

Not without fans
Yet Windows NT is not without fans among ISD readers. Michael West, vice president of technology at Pixelworks, Inc., San Ramon, Calif., reports that he's been using Modelsim from Model Technology, Inc. of Beaverton, Ore., on NT boxes for upwards of a year, with excellent results. "The reliability of NT is more than sufficient. We often launch simulations that take over a week to complete. NT crashes haven't been a problem," he insists. These NT machines use a fully integrated visual environment consisting of Sledgehammer [from Hammer Storage Solutions; Newark, Calif.] as an editor; [Microsoft's] Sourcesafe for version control; MKS, a Unix-like shell; and Modelsim, a VHDL-Verilog simulator.

In contrast, West continues, "on our SPARC machines, we're stuck with vi or Emacs [text editors], RCS [Revision Control System], and Modelsim in a totally nonintegrated environment. We could upgrade our Unix systems with Crisp and Sourcesafe and come close to the integration level of Intel architecture systems. However, there always seems to be some glitch that prevents these tools from working well together in Unix environments. Our current plan is to switch completely to NT once all the tools are available."

One person who would no doubt take issue with that plan is Javan Gargus, an engineering student at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, who has already undertaken some design work. "The stability of Windows NT can't be compared with that of any version of Unix, especially Linux; there is simply no contest. NT--and Windows 95, for that matter--are the only operating systems I have ever seen crash when they were doing absolutely nothing. That sort of thing doesn't happen on a Unix workstation without some kind of hardware failure."

Unix, Gargus contends, is also more logically organized than NT and therefore easier to use. "I'm far more productive under Unix than under NT. I choose to do the majority of my Java development using Xemacs [X Windows version of Emacs] under Solaris 2.6 rather than on my NT workstation. NT crashes often, and Unix makes it much easier to work with code files and changed environmental configurations. Also, Java classes and files are case-sensitive. Under NT, they aren't, and that creates difficulties when you're trying to build applications."

Sometimes, the rubber screeches loudly when it meets the road of unreliability. David Anderson, a consulting programmer with Vaughns Computer Solutions in Wilkesboro, N.C., tells of being "awake at 5:15 in the morning trying to complete projects for customers waiting for delivery. About 45 minutes before, NT 4 presented another lovely 'Blue Screen of Death.' After cleaning up the drives and fixing the structural errors, I rebooted what is only a couple of builds down from the Win98 version.

"If I had all the necessary software running under Linux," he declares, "I'd be running it instead." In fact, he adds, "more applications that have what I need are slowly being released for Linux." One of his customers has a Linux system that has been running without a break for about 165 days. "Do reasonable companies expect an engineer to use an unreliable system to design a reliable product? Not if they're truly interested in quality products."

Jarek Luberek of Ericsson Microwave Systems in Sweden, a system design engineer who has "had it up to here" with NT, would surely sympathize. "I'm fighting each day to make my company realize the value of Linux," he writes. "Almost two years of NT have left me with one feeling: no more. If somebody tries to put NT on my desktop again, I'd install Linux or quit."

Not just designers
Such sentiments are by no means confined to EDA specialists. Thomas Junier, a molecular biologist in the Bioengineering Department of the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research in Epalinges, adds, "I've happily used a Pentium-Linux workstation. Although it had a dual-boot (Windows 95) option, I very quickly realized that I could dispense with the Windows 95 component. The department also designed a Linux-based cluster of PCs for parallel computing applications.

"If I were forced to use NT, I'd probably consider resigning on the spot. I've never taken a single course in computer science and have used Macs for most of my studies, so I'm not what you'd call a technical freak. Yet I have had no particular problems learning Unix, and now there's no way I'd switch to anything else."

In a similar spirit, an anonymous system manager for large Web sites says that he "had to go through a nightmare and lost a couple of weekends converting mission-critical apps from NT to Unix (Solaris). The story is typical--management ignoring the warnings from the techies and purchasing NT solutions based on pricing and the promises made by sales reps."

As an electrical engineer, the manager has had a happy four-year history with Linux and saw it "gaining huge popularity--almost every techie I know is running it, and a couple of us are using it at work for our desktops. I think Linux could very successfully address management's concerns about the price of Unix boxes."

In fact, Guillermo Romero, an ASIC consultant with BBN Corp., Winthrop, Mass., says, "We, the designers, don't care what processor is inside the box. It could be an Alpha, a Pentium, or a PowerPC. We care about the reliability of the OS platform. NT is totally unreliable, and the applications crash often. I use a Sun workstation at work and a Pentium machine running Linux at home. These are true multitasking, multiprocessor machines. I want to see more Linux machines and more CAD/CAM software running on them. Such software is less expensive and more powerful than its NT counterparts, and all the power of Unix is in Linux. NT is for simple, single tasks. If you want to work with ASIC designs of 100 kbytes or more and run many tasks at the same time, you must use Linux on PCs," he concludes.

Another "had it up to here" insight about Windows NT comes from Mike Rosing at the Department of Physiology of the University of Wisconsin Medical School, Madison. "I use NT and am very tired of messages like 'This program has executed an illegal operation.' An hour's work is gone every time. The problem is that I can't sell Linux to the IS people, because it isn't supported by any one [famous] vendor. If Linux gets real support it would take over engineering apps on PCs."

Another anti-NT voice, Michael Banak a member of the technical staff at Lucent Technologies, Inc.'s Network Systems unit in Naperville, Ill., notes that "among my colleagues, there's a strong tradition of Unix tools. Thus I thought that resistance to change would be the dominant factor" in the unwillingness of many designers to use Windows NT. Later, he found that the real problem was the "sheer lack of reliability in any Windows environment."

Banak notes that a "particularly skilled engineer" in his group "writes Windows applications for our test environment. He's at his wits' end with unexpected bugs and crashes. Try doing a 'log on as a different user' shutdown under NT," Banak suggests. "You can get several different results. It's hair-raising."

A detailed view of stability in both home and work environments comes from Michael North, who works in CAE ASIC and FPGA support at Newbridge Networks Corp., Kanata, Ont. "I run Leonardo and Galileo tools [from Exemplar Logic] on the Linux platform with no problems, as well as such EDA tools as Spice."

At home, his 200-MHz Pentium Pro machine has 32 Mbytes of EDO RAM, Linux kernel 2.0.30, X Windows with the Accelerated X v2.1 server, a Number9 Imagine 128 series 2 graphics card with 4 Mbytes of VRAM, and a 4-Gbyte IBM hard disk. Besides Linux, he has disk partitions for Windows 95 and NT 4 on this machine. "Windows 95 runs FPGA apps well, crashes occasionally, and is generally sluggish," he reports. "NT hangs once in a while--I haven't had an outright crash--and I find it a bit sluggish, again with FPGA apps."

In contrast, "Linux runs quite well, doesn't crash, and is far from sluggish--even with many virtual desktops in use running multiple copies of Xemacs, a mailer, Netscape, Andrew EZ word processor, various x terms, drawing programs, Leonardo, Spice, and so forth. I would be hard-pressed to match this performance with Windows 95 or NT. Even keeping the machine up for a long time under either of the Microsoft operating systems while not running apps causes the machine to become sluggish. Linux just keeps going." Meanwhile, at work, North runs an UltraSPARC machine with 128 Mbytes of RAM. "At times," he says, "I find it sluggish compared with my Linux box."

One engineer at a small chip design start-up, Jonathan Mayer of Irvine, Calif., has gotten personal with the different flavors of development platforms and proposes a cost-based view of reliability: "We have an environment consisting of four Sun Ultra 10 workstations, four AMD K6 Linux boxes, a Sun Ultra 5, and a 233-MHz Pentium II running NT. The relative prices are interesting, particularly in view of the reliability issue. The AMD K6 Linux system costs about $1,200, the 233-MHz Pentium II system $2,000, an Ultra 5 system $4,500, and an Ultra 10 system $9,000."

Yet, of those machines, "the ones running Linux have been by far the most robust, well documented, and easy to administer. NT runs a distant second, and Solaris has been a constant source of heartache." Sun, he notes, "is responding by repricing its low-end workstations." Nonetheless, "Though an Ultra 5 can be had relatively inexpensively and works with any SVGA monitor, Sun still forces customers to buy Sun-brand monitors at a hefty markup. Memory, too, is very expensive if purchased through the Sun reseller."

William D. Rozmiarek, a "consultant at large" in Green Bay, Wisc., has a pragmatic approach to reliability: "When I buy a new PC," he declares, "the first thing I do is reformat the hard drive, install a copy of Linux, and use the included Windows 95 or NT CD-ROM as a drink coaster." Recently, he installed a file and print server for a client with a small network of six PCs running Windows 95, DOS, and Windows 3.1. "For speed, price, reliability, dependability, and manageability," Rozmiarek chose Linux running on a 200-MHz Pentium with "Samba's implementation of the SMB protocol for file and print sharing. My client was very impressed with the new server's speed and dependability. But he was surprised and confused--more the latter than the former--to find that the server OS and all the client software was freely available over the Internet."

Productivity above all?
The real issue, ultimately, is how a platform is actually used. "Malcolm," who requested that his family name be withheld, is a physicist who programs FPGAs. To undertake this task, "We recently invested in a popular EDA software package for NT. I am astonished at the low quality of Windows NT software. I was able to make it crash several times within the first hour. It's hard to see how the software could be used for a serious project. For now, we're designing new boards with parts from Cypress [Semiconductor Corp., San Jose], because we can get the Warp tool to run under Solaris for a reasonable price."

Malcolm says he had asked Cypress to port Warp to Linux. "The engineers were incredibly enthusiastic about doing this, but the managers had the usual 'over my dead body' attitude." Of course, productivity discussions don't go far before software pricing enters the picture. "We were unable to find an affordable Unix package," Malcolm laments. "I'd suspect that with less expensive software, the market for FPGAs could be greatly expanded. Using a decent VHDL compiler, even bubbleheads like me can produce working circuit designs without much trouble."

Such comments are surprising in the era of computer-aided market research. A developer of EDA software, who also requested anonymity, suggests that users aren't telling their EDA vendors what they really want. "I'm interested in whether designers would embrace Linux. I'm currently writing Verilog and VHDL synthesis compilers for a large semiconductor company, and my development platform is a 200-MHz Pentium Pro running Red Hat Linux [Red Hat Software, Research Triangle Park, N.C.].

"It's working out extremely well, especially since I've been able to create cross-compilers targeting 32-bit DOS and SPARC-Solaris. That means I can produce all binaries from a single machine. But I still need to persuade my boss and coworkers that there's a demand for a Linux version. I'm also trying to promote the use of Java for the GUI components. If EDA users want these kinds of things, they need to let the vendors know."

A similar view of productivity comes from Jeffrey Watts, a programmer-consultant with NT Integrators, Lawrence, Kans. "I've worked on both NT 4 and Linux workstations. I'm twice as effective using Linux," he says. "To get things done, I often telnet to a Linux box from the NT workstation."

Of course, productivity is related to reliability. "Our company has a park of 50-plus Sun machines and 7 HP-9000s," writes Transwitch's Zhabinskiy. "All our tools and scripts, as well as the working environment, have been polished for years on Unix systems. Our simulations run more than two or three days even on 300-MHz Ultra 2s. We need stability. Some of the Sun machines haven't rebooted for more than a year."

Brad Martin, an engineer and managing partner at North Shore Circuit Design LLP, Austin, Texas, suggests that the size of a work group should play an important role in the choice between NT and Linux. "Our experience with Linux is entirely positive," he says; nonetheless, "I imagine that single-seat applications will run as fast on NT-based systems as on Unix- or Linux-based systems."

'Wither NT?'
Martin once found himself "in the middle of an NT-versus-Unix debate held by one of my customers." One of the tool groups was preparing a major release and posed the question 'Whither NT?' The responses, he says, were more or less those suggested by ISD's April editorial. There were "a few surprises," however.

"Of the operating systems I use, only Linux lets me trim the kernel down to an absolute minimum so the design program gets all the resources it needs, without the OS impacting its execution," says NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Bob Thurstans.

Of course, many supporters of Windows NT saw it as "inevitable," but others were "users on small design teams employing point tools in a single-seat design flow," he notes. Meanwhile, "the most strident opponents were from the large design groups, who use networks of Unix machines to solve problems concurrently." A large project might "have 50 to 100 people from a dozen different IC specialties, each working on the same database spread among six or seven servers, with the network as a distributed computing resource. Many of the methods for uniting these servers and process chains are simple Unix utilities, written and managed by working line engineers. "No one in the argument claimed that this sort of complex engineered computing network could be duplicated in the NT world. NT is a closed box of point tools linked by an untouchable matrix of invisible semaphores. These bonds are surrounded by a blizzard of mystifying, contradictory, and forever-changing OS documentation. Under an NT regime, almost all Unix users will lose the ability to exert low-level control over data and applications."

In the end, Martin continues, "I finally grasped a simple reality underneath NT's successes and failures: NT was developed and tested by Microsoft's enormous software development team. Most if not all of that company's software groups use it as a development platform. That explains the enormous sophistication and depth of many server functions. But if you aren't a huge software design group, you may be completely out of luck," since whatever Microsoft's team did not find important for its own needs is "not supported in the OS, and there's no way to add it."

Don Parrish-Bell, a hardware engineer who designs digital circuits using FPGAs and CPLDs at San Diego's Visicom, Inc., offers a contrasting--but not fundamentally different--view. "I prefer Windows 95­based applications because the company can afford to buy more PC-based tools than bloated, very overpriced workstation tools. Take Mentor Graphics, for instance; it costs $20,000-plus a year to keep one license alive. We can buy personal copies of OrCAD Capture for every design engineer, with change left over! It's the same with Synopsys ."

Keith Hayes, a design engineer for Linktech, Bohemia, N.Y., reports that he "can honestly say that the reliability of the NT OS has increased." Yet he adds that "in no way is it comparable to any Unix OS, including the free ones." An enthusiastic user of HP-UX 11 on Hewlett-Packard workstations who also administers and uses NT 4 and Linux running on Intel- and Alpha-based systems, he undertakes "digital design work with multiple CAE suites, including Mentor Graphics', and some software development. I have never had to bring down any of the Unix hosts to recover from an application crash."

Bob Thurstans at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasa-dena, Calif., also runs programs under different architectures and finds that Linux's open program "has the most to offer. Many design programs take up many system resources. Of the operating systems I use, only Linux lets me trim the kernel down to an absolute minimum so the design program gets all the resources it needs, without the OS impacting its execution."

Summarizing the productivity issue, Patrick Hearon, an undergraduate at Rice University in Houston, says simply, "When I want to get work done, I reboot to Linux. Like most people, I'm attracted by its stability, speed, interoperability with the campus Solaris servers, and wonderful general flexibility--especially the networking support; nothing else compares. My only wish now is that more companies would support Linux, both on the hardware and the software front."

Contributor Murry Shohat is a freelance writer based in Santa Rosa, Calif.

To voice an opinion on this or any Integrated System Design article, please email your message to miker@isdmag.com.

integrated system design  July 1998