If you run a buggy program on a modern OS, it won't crash the system or impact other processes. If you run a buggy program on DOS, it will write to random physical addresses, probably clobbering the state of other processes and of DOS.
Modern OSes can run arbitrary binaries, but they can pretty much run arbitrary non-adversarial binaries - problematic binaries have to be intentionally written to exploit the system (as opposed to DOS, where non-problematic binaries had to be intentionally written to not break the system).
It doesn't matter what OS I run. My "modern", and apparently buggy, CPU runs arbitrary systems that I know very little about, and I have little to no control over.
For anyone who doesn't get it, the name and logo comes from the famous story where Henry Ford, maker of the Model T -- one of the first affordable automobiles, because it was made on an assembly line -- said "Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black." This quote and assembly-line idea translate into the branding of this project. (The project logo is visually similar to the modern Ford company logo, but with the word Black instead of Ford.)
No, it's like telling the candy maker that their candy made them sick or otherwise left something to be desired. If the candy maker cares about making good candy, that can be useful information, even if they may not have time to do something about it. If the candy maker cares about making mediocre-to-bad candy freely available, then they will say "it's free, go away."
No, it is exactly as i wrote above, the idea isn't to complain back, it is that you get shit for free and you have no standing to demand for anything more than what you got. If free candy makes you sick maybe next time do not accept free candy from strangers, hm?
(of course i knew someone would try to reply with a "No, it is like <insert post ignoring the point here>" but decided to go with it anyway)
There are plenty of System X HPC installs. They just no longer come from IBM. Even when IBM still owned the line, it was being outsourced. The University of California SRCS system from ~10 years ago was an iDataPlex sold to us by IBM. Most of the boards had Asus marked on them.
Also remember the System X line was sold way after the Think lines.
It really is going to depend on what test you are running. HT has the greatest effect when the running process has a lot of "downtime" for things like memory retrieval or any I/O as it allows for other processes to make use of this downtime. So if your tests are just doing calculations with very little file/network I/O it could very well be in the 9% range.
Welcomed and encouraged to submit their driver for consideration. I would guess that the vast majority of vendor-proprietary drivers would get rejected from upstream, so for most cases the viable options for vendors wishing have an driver in mainline are to improve an existing reverse-engineered driver or rewrite the driver to fit the kernel standards.
A lot of the drivers are older than their Linux port, which makes mainlining from the start not really make sense. Nvidia and PowerVR I know for a fact are in that category.
There are a number of things that could be done to improve the experience with proprietary drivers, but all of them undermine the Linux driver philosophy. For the kernel community, any driver that is not mainlined is doing it wrong (and there are a number of compelling arguments behind this position), so the out of tree / proprietary driver experience is intentionally not improved.
There's basically no chance that the current proprietary drivers will ever end up upstream, so if ARM / nvidia drivers were open source they would be out of tree.
Given that the most frequently cited reason that these drivers should be open source is improved user experience (less breakage when the kernel changes, easier install), what would be the advantage of an out of tree open source driver?
Modern OSes can run arbitrary binaries, but they can pretty much run arbitrary non-adversarial binaries - problematic binaries have to be intentionally written to exploit the system (as opposed to DOS, where non-problematic binaries had to be intentionally written to not break the system).
It's a dramatic improvement.