[SunRescue] SunPCi Upgrades

[Christopher Byrne]

Overall the SunPCI-II is so much better than the original in so many aspects
that I'd say there is no comparison. I have used both extensivley, and I can
say that other than disk performance, the II is little different from having
a nice intel clone workstation with low end video.

Of course that disk performance issue can make a HUGE differnece in overall
system performance so watch out. You aren't going to be running an oracle
server on any SunPCI product unless you really like pain.

The original SunPCI on the other hand is a lot more of a compromise. The
bridged ethernet is as you said quite slow, and I have found it to be
somewhat flaky. The choice of the K5 and K6 processor family severly limited
their performance, and their board architecture and chipset was quite poor
as well. And of course taking up the space of two full slots is always an
annoyance, though for some a livable one.

As far as other OS's go I dont know, I haven't tried as of yet. I do know of
someone who has his U10 with SunPCI-II running (apparently successfully)
Linux, Solaris X86, Win 98, Win NT, Win ME, Win 2K, multiple BSD's, and
VMWARE with several operating systems. Of course this guy is a software
developer, and he uses this machine to test his cross platform programs.

Just a guess, but I'm thinking he uses a dos boot routine to load partition
magic/boot magic, and then boots up the other OS's from there. I'm sure it
took plenty of hacking around to get them working, and the concept of
running an X-server in an X-window just seems masochistic to me anyway.


Chris Byrne

-----Original Message-----
From: rescue-admin at sunhelp.org [mailto:rescue-admin at sunhelp.org]On
Behalf Of Eric Ozrelic
Sent: Monday, December 18, 2000 21:43
To: rescue at sunhelp.org
Subject: Re: [SunRescue] SunPCi Upgrades


Yeah, pretty funny how Sun only put a 600MHz Celron in there. I'm almost
certain that they
didn't want to put a higher MHz cpu on the card then what they're baseline
UltraSparc 3 CPU's run at....

How does the onboard 10/100 ethernet work on your SunPCi2? I hope it's more
efficient then
Sun's stupid ethernet re-director that's butt slow. I wonder if you could
install other OS's
besides Windows, and SolarisX86 because of some of the new features on the
card.

Regards,

Eric Ozrelic

Unix wuss and SunPCi fan....


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