[geeks] OS for an Ultra 2

[Michael-John Turner]

On Tue, Jun 27, 2006 at 07:24:31PM -0400, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> The primary reported problem was the giant lock performance issue, and
> crashes in sparc64.

Unfortunately the crashes on sparc64 systems are fatal - the system aborts
to the PROM when spinning up the non-boot processor(s).

> If they haven't made any useful progress in 3.0, then there is no
> point in installing that on a U2.

Yep, progress has been made, but it's still not working in -current
(and so I imagine it won't make it into 4.0 then). 32-bit SPARC SMP works
like a champ, but not 64-bit. FWIW, I run NetBSD 3.0_STABLE on my dual CPU
Ultra 2, but it's using a uniprocessor kernel (ie the second CPU is
ignored).

FreeBSD is of course an option too - SMP works fine on 64-bit SPARC, it has
fine-grained locking and the 6.x releases have received a lot of positive
reviews.

-mj
-- 
Michael-John Turner | http://mjturner.net/
mj at turner.org.za    | Open Source in WC ZA - http://www.clug.org.za/