On Fri, 21 Dec 2001, Orlando Andico wrote: > 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.
Yup, the solaris god has spoken. But again, for the purposes of putting everything in perspective: Take for example this common scenario: A company buys x-million peso worth of E450, runs it for a while, and the maintenance runs out. The OS is hopelessly outdated, and it will cost several thousands more + recurring maintenance fee to re-stock the server. No budget. What would you do? I'm not saying that Linux can stand head-to-head with commercial solaris. I'm saying that for the most part, the IO devices are accesible, and perform in a manner that is consistent with the rated speed of the server. Linux on sparc already runs most needed applications for an internal server (of course the database server will have to be PgSQL, not oracle), so whats the point in getting solaris? The XGL/XIL support is simply not needed by common office deployments unless you are a CAD/CAM shop. The bcopy accelerator makes sense on RAM-intensive computations. Most of the time the system is waiting for a network/disk operation to return, as the disk and network is still the slowest device on the system. Linux on sparc may be lame(and stupid), but in today's environment of shrinking profit margins, and markets, it makes perfect sense, as most that you need is already there and has no (for-pay) license attached to it. _ 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]
