[SunRescue] Re: Trolls and MP on rescued suns

[Mike Meredith at home]

On Mon, 09 Oct 2000, Gregory Leblanc wrote:
> > From: Ken Hansen [mailto:n2vip at bellatlantic.net]
> >     Sun vs. GCC compiler (Sun has better optomizer?)
>
> Assuming, of course, that you purchase the Sun compiler.  I certainly
> can't afford their compiler, unless it's cheaper on disk space and
> the wallet than it was.

I seem to remember that Sun's justification for the high cost of their 
original WorkShop product was that you got a lot more than just a C 
compiler. Things may have changed --- it seems possible to license just 
the C compiler, which may be cheaper (possibly not cheap enough 
although I haven't the faintest idea of what it costs).

> >     SMP (Sun has a better SMP kernel?)
>
> Clear Solaris wins out here, I'm sure that the scheduling things are
> somewhat crude on Linux.

It'll be interesting to see how well 2.4 does SMP.

> >     Memory (Solaris wants more memory)
>
> As an enterprise system, who cares?  Solaris is able to do a lot more
> with that ram.  As a desktop, perhaps it's an issue, but with 256MB
> of ram, it shouldn't make any difference at all.

There's probably a high number of servers out there with less than 
256Mbyte of memory. Off the top of my head, I can think of 3 at work 
that don't have that much (all the way down to 48Mbytes in an SS10).