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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
License issues aside, the technical problems of getting Linux onto the desktop have not been simple. For early adopters such as SideFX and Dreamworks the solution was to get professional help: Hewlett-Packard's Ft. Collins graphics group.
At Dreamworks, Leonard laments that the thing that drove graphics card performance on Linux in the early days of the migration was the first-person shooter computer game Quake. Gamers who were fans of Linux and Quake hacked on Linux until Quake ran smoothly.
"If you were using something that Quake relied on, you were great," says Leonard. "If you were using something that Quake didn't care about you were probably in some serious problem." They faced problems like getting 24 frames per second 2-D playback with synchronized sound and making that work reliably and consistently. HP helped solve the problems.
Fortunately, open source tends to move moderately quickly for infrastructure pieces, such as video card drivers -- code that allows a video card to work with a particular configuration of hardware and software. But as Leonard notes, "This is sort of the best and bad news at the same time. The good news is that the technology changes really rapidly. That's also the bad news."
Today the studio faces the question of which technology to be on. "The sum of all this is that there are many pieces that must fit together to create a stable environment for two years," says Leonard. "That's a pretty challenging task when you're not going to a single source vendor like we did with SGI. The biggest challenge is creating stability in a very dynamic world. Choice is good, and choice is bad."
Leonard says that while the industry is willing to accept short-term solutions that are not open source because of the early stage of the migration, they want to see long-term strategies that do use open source. "We've said to vendors like HP, 'In order for us to partner, we really want to see you embrace Linux and open source.'" That gives the industry more flexibility in choosing hardware. The industry is driving open-source solutions from vendors.
The VFX industry has spent the last year doing some experimenting. "Not everybody has 25 people to dedicate toward a Linux initiative," notes Leonard. "The ILMs, the Dreamworks, the Pixars of the world have those kind of resources, and all are actively engaged in doing it. And as we do it, everybody benefits. As we figure out how to get drivers aligned with the hardware, they become available to other places that can't invest in the engineering to make it work."
In any case, Leonard is pleased with the results. "Today, I'm happy to say, all of these things have succeeded to the point where we feel confident to committing all of our pipelines to be 100 percent Linux for the desktop and the render farm."
