On Fri, 21 Dec 2001, Ian C. Sison wrote: .. > Not really. The E450 uses standard PCI, 64Bit even. It uses NCR-SYMBIOS > SCSI, and standard SCSI drives. Not much to tweak there. You can stick in > most 3com adapters also. About the only thing SUN native is the VGA > adapter. In fact i was so surprised that when i initiated a shutdown on ..
*cough* *cough* and what is that wonderful 64-bit PCI bus connected to? and what is the memory bus connected to? all these things are connected to... GASP! a UPA interconnect!! which has no PC equivalent!! that's why you can hang 10 PCI busses off an UltraSPARC and still get no bandwidth degradation (can we say 2.4gbytes/second overall I/O throughput through the UPA backplane?) the E450 has 6 separate, independent PCI busses. Just because it uses Symbios SCSI controllers doesn't mean your run-o'-the-mill ASUS 3000peso SCSI controller is comparable: your run-o'-the-mill ASUS is connected to a south bridge, and is grubbing for bandwidth along with the memory, AGP bus, IDE controller... etc. etc. etc. second: older UltraSparcs like the E450 use EDO RAM. So the latency is high (60ns plus compared to sub-10ns for SDRAM). BUT: E450 RAM is interleaved and is VERY wide: 512 bits vs 64- or 72-bits for PC SDRAM. Also the cache is different. So something optimized for a PC architecture would be suboptimal on a Sparc. Oh yeah. Some Suns also have this esoterica called a "bcopy accelerator." Ever heard of that? it's the same as that old Linux kernel patch for 2.0 which uses the FPU registers (which are largely unused in kernel space) for speeding up the memcpy() operator. Sun's have had it for years: a dedicated chip for accelerating bcopy. What about Prestoserve? this was very popular on some older Sun hardware. You stuck this thing into your MBus chassis, and it would sit between the disk controller and the disk, essentially a small nonvolatile RAM cache. It made UFS metadata updates (which are by definition synchronous) run a lot faster. There's lots of purpose-built stuff in Sun equipment which is simply unsupported in a third-party OS. Where's the XGL/XIL support for the Creator3D graphics card in <your favorite third-party OS> ? If you read Larry McVoy's comments in L-K, he sez Linux has a long way to go before it can touch Solaris. Or AIX. Or HP-UX. And I believe him! if I had an (expensive) Sun, with hardware purpose-built to support Solaris, I'd be pretty stupid to run Linux on it. Unless of course it's a junker SS5 that won't run Solaris 8 fast enough. For that, I'd use NetBSD. -- Orlando Andico <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Mosaic Communications, Inc. _ Philippine Linux Users Group. Web site and archives at http://plug.linux.org.ph To leave: send "unsubscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe to the Linux Newbies' List: send "subscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
