[SunRescue] 4/470 os's

[bobk]

On Fri, 18 Feb 2000, Peter Koch wrote:

> Hi!
> 
> One thing should be made clear: The ol' SunOS kernel is
> highly optimized for the Sun hardware. It is lean (not the
> big fat bloaten pig like Solaris and even Linux) and has
> most (if not all) system calls you may want.

Linux CAN be small, if you take out what you don't need.

> It does not only feel faster, it runs faster on the old
> Sun3 or Sparc (sun4, sun4c) hardware, period. And it runs
> MUCH faster than Linux or NetBSD. And it is much more
> stable than the free Unices and supports much more of the
> VME-Bus hardware (linux supports virtually nothing,
> NetBSD has still a lot of problems with many VME-Bus
> cards).

My experiences with OpenBSD 2.5 vs. SunOS 4.1.3 on an IPX with 32 MB of ram
show that the OpenBSD IP stack is TWICE as fast as SunOS. This was
measured with ping response times and FTP transfer rates.

I haven't been able to get Linux installed on the IPX, but I think that
low-load performance would be even better than OpenBSD. (high loads may be
a different story. Lots of anecdotal evidence suggests that the BSD stack
performs better than Linux under high load, but I haven't seen this
myself)

Now I don't know about the VME stuff, but on the SBUS, SunOS looses.
However, I still have a drive with sunos on it because sometimes I want
that 1992 nostalgia back.