[geeks] Opinions on the HP C3x00?

[Jochen Kunz]

On Tue, 28 Mar 2006 12:49:17 -0500 (EST)
nate at portents.com wrote:

> Well with the right card I can get a 24-bit framebuffer with the
> 32-bit kernel at least, but I guess that isn't saying much if it's not
> accelerated at all.
AFAIK the kernel frame buffer is complete unaccelerated. Nothing I wane
use on a general purpose desktop system.

> How bad is HP-UX?
I had a look into 10.20. It is strange, weird, neither fish nor flesh,
... I never felt "at home". I never got used to it. IRIX or Tru64 have
there own weirdnes, but I got acclimatised to it.

Tru64 is almost dead, killed by HP.

IRIX is doomed to die and already in agony. It lacks features in the
networking area. The latest Freeware from SGI is nearly two years old
and I don't expect a new IRIX freeware set at all. IRIX is stagnating
and it starts to collect dust.

I may even go to the extreme and by a PeeCee. Ugly hardware but runs
NetBSD, by favortite OS, well and I get the compute power I need. Today
"real computers" are either too expensive or much slower then a PeeCee.
:-(

> The way folks talk about it here, it sounds pretty bad.
Well, it is called "HPsUX"... Maybe it got better with 11.x

> Is HP-UX bad, or is it simply so marginalized
> that it's a pain to use because there's not much of a hobbyist
> community out there and HP could care less about UNIX on PA-RISC at
> this point?
HP wants you to go Itanic - or Windows on ia32. They wane get rid of
that old PA-RISC nad Alpha "crap". And yes, there are not that many
hobbyists out there that run HPsUX for the fun of it. I don't know of a
site like e.g. nekochan for HPsUX.

> > The other problem with
> > Linux is GCC. To my experience GCC produces quite bad and slow
> > PA-RISC code. So some of the CPU performance is lost due to
> > inefficient binaries.
> I could believe that, but wouldn't using HP's compilers in HP-UX mean
> having to port opensource applications over rather than just
> recompile? Doesn't seem worth it to me if that's the case.
As already mentioned: The system compiler is K&R. All you can use it for
is linking a new kernel effectively. You should also take in mind that
it is often a major PITA to compile Linuxish GNUware with a non-GCC
compiler. The more fun you get if you do it on a big endian or 64 bit
platform. Been there with MIPSpro on IRIX and the DEC compilers on
Tru64... Compiling everything your own is irrealistic. These days you
have so many dependencies that it will drive you insane if you wane
fight it without some automation like pkgsrc.

> I have sitting around a PowerMac 8600 with a dual 180Mhz 604e card,
> 1MB of L2 cache, gig of RAM, PCI Radeon 7200, DEC Tulip-based Apple
> 10/100 ethernet card, and an ATTO UW-SCSI controller - would I be
> better off putting all that together and installing a *BSD UNIX?
Hmm. Most likely the HP would be better, even when running Linux. Keep
in mind that the PA-RISC CPUs have a lot of MIPS / MHz. A 240 MHz PA8200
is as fast as a 500 MHz Alpha EV56.
--


tsch|_,
       Jochen

Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/