[SunRescue] Best prices on SS20/Ultra compatible RAM... and s ome disk pointer s/finds

[Gregory Leblanc]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kurt Mosiejczuk [mailto:kurt at csh.rit.edu]
> Sent: Wednesday, June 28, 2000 11:57 AM
> To: 'rescue at sunhelp.org'
> Subject: RE: [SunRescue] Best prices on SS20/Ultra compatible 
> RAM... and
> s ome disk pointer s/finds
> 
> On Wed, 28 Jun 2000, Gregory Leblanc wrote:
> 
> > I can post some benchmarks that I did on my SS20.  The 
> machine is a dual
> > SM41, 128MB of ram, 4GB IBM SCSI SCA drive.  Running 
> Solaris, from the
> > console login, I ran tiobench (it's a multi-threaded 
> benchmarking program).
> > With a data size of 768MB, it was able to read and write 
> about 7MB/sec to
> > that disk.  From Linux, on the SAME disk, at the console, 
> it was able to
> > write about 3MB/sec.  Mind you, that's still quite a bit faster than
> > ethernet, but it's still pretty darn awful, compared to 
> Solaris.  On a 3
> > disk RAID 0, Linux got the same read speed, so it's a 
> problem with the ESP
> > SCSI driver on linux, and not something with the drive.  If 
> I could get a
> > 100Mbit ethernet card for my SPARCs, I suspect that it 
> would be faster than
> > the disk.
> 
> Ok... it mainly piqued my interest because using an NFS root under
> Linux/sun3 is ACTUALLY faster than using a local disk (DMA doesn't
> work right last I checked).  I do know that Linux's SCSI subsystem
> isn't top notch and an overhaul is planned in 2.5.  The annoying
> "sda/sdb/sdc" thing has bitten me before... I like Solaris's c0t0d0s0
> method MUCH better.

Yeah, nobody has decided to give me any Sun3's yet, and the only machines
that I used from close to that era were Apple II, so I can't justify buying
them.  Besides, my room is too small for any more VME crates. :-)
There are patches available for Linux, something called 'devfs', that fixes
the SCSI disk problems.  I like that the Solaris names are fixed, but
they're long to read, so hopefully that doesn't get copied too much.  Or at
least get's broken down with a few /s.

> I am curious as to which version of the kernel you used though, I do
> know that the Debian sparc people consider the 2.2 kernel the first
> "real" kernel for the sparc architecture.

I've been bashing Debian for a while now, because nobody there has read the
stuff by ESR that says "release early, release often".  I realize that he
was talking about software, but I think the same applies for distributions.
Anyway, the kernel that I did that testing on was 2.2.14.  Anton and David
tell me that the 2.4.x kernels will actually have functional drivers for the
SCSI systems on SPARC, I'll be doing some testing on that just as soon as I
get word that things are stable.  
Oh, the Debian people are correct that the 2.2.x kernel, and more
specifically 2.2.3 and later, are the first REAL Linux kernels for SPARC.
Before then, SPARC was still a separate patch tree so upgrading the kernel
was a royal pain.
	Greg