[rescue] HAL computer systems SL/100R

[James Lockwood]

On Tue, 28 May 2002, Full_Name wrote:

> One will probably see use as a central server for our network (quite a bit
> of NFS, mail, DNS, ssh, http probabily) the other I was thinking of using as
> my personal machine (althought a Fujitsu dual Pentium SMP is tempting as
> well).  I'm comming to the conclusion that these are probabily waste on such
> trivial applications but I didn't realise *quite* how nice / powerful they
> were when I bought them.

They are reasonably fast CPU-wise.  They are on the "economy" end of the
Sun scale but nevertheless have decent I/O.

> One I'm possibly going to rehouse into an ATX case as it looks simpler than
> trying to remove and refit the power supply.  Does Sun sell suitable cases
> for these (for a reasonable amount) because otherwise I can see myself
> having to knock holes in a PC case.

The AXi is an ATX board and conforms to the ATX specs.  You should not
need to make any modifications to an ATX compliant case.

That said, I don't know if the SL/100R is missing the metal backpanel for
the onboard I/O connectors.  If so you might have to cobble something
together.

The most important thing to do is to ensure that you have good cooling.
Without airflow directly over the CPU you will end up cooking something.
Early CPU modules supplied for the AXi did not have CPU fans and relied on
chassis cooling, later ones added them.

> I'm not familiar with these - would you mind explaining a bit more?

http://www.sun.com/desktop/products/graphics/creator3d.html
http://www.sun.com/desktop/products/graphics/elite3d.html

These cards plug directly into a UPA slave slot (typ. 100-120MHz/64-bit).
In the case of the AXi this slot is next to one of the PCI slots and the
card mounts vertically.  They offer reasonably fast 2D with simultaneous 8
and 24-bit visuals overlaid, and fast (the Elite3d was exceptionally fast
when introduced) nontextured 3D via OpenGL.

There is also a 2D version of the Creator which leaves out 3D acceleration
and some of the higher resolutions.

> ummm... not sure I'm going to be running any suitable software although it
> sounds intreaging; have never before owned anything powerful enough to
> handle 3D beyond Doom :-)

All of Sun's 3D graphics solutions until recently were aimed squarely at
the CAD/CAM market, and have very good performance (on par with some of
SGI's best offerings) until you start to texture.  Once you start
texturing then things go seriously downhill.  :-/

> According to the UltraLinux FAQ:
> "Originally the port was done to 32-bit SPARC machines.  Later a kernel
> was developed to exploit the 64-bit features of Sun's newer UltraSPARC
> chips. Under Linux, the 32-bit SPARC architecture is known as
> "sparc", and the 64-bit as "sparc64". The architecture
> dependent parts for the sparc64 were included in the Linux kernel tree as
> of version 2.2.5"
> I take this (nad other sources) to mean that the "sparc64" port is aimed at
> all 64 bit SPARC machines but designed for the UltraSPARC.

It's does not appear so.  The "sparc64" architecture runs on SPARC V9
systems but not on SPARC64 systems (at least, it didn't last year
according to the refs I dug up).

Fujitsu also sells an updated version of the SPARC64 arch (SPARC64GP)
which conforms to the V9 specs.  I do not know what progress if any has
been made by Linux/BSD in running on these systems (they typically have
large numbers of CPU's and would be unattractive targets anyway).

> How different in admin terms are they?  Have used Solaris machines but am

If anyone must flame a comment below, please do it civilly and give my
statements a little latitude.  This is necessarily a qualitative issue.

They are both more similar to each other than to, say, AIX 4.  I find
Solaris administration to be more logically laid out with a greater sense
of feature cohesion within the OS.  That said, by the time you install
every package that ${LINUX_DIST} comes with, you can end up with a similar
muddle.

I _greatly_ prefer the Solaris handling of device nodes, especially SCSI
devices.  Handling of large (>2GB) files is more mature, as is fs logging
and RAID.  The Solaris NFS implementation is probably the most mature that
there is, which should come as no surprise.  Sun's compiler suite produces
significantly better code on SPARC than gcc does, but you generally have
to pay for it.

Generally speaking, Solaris is optimized for stability and scalability
over raw performance.  I'm not making a value judgement here, only you can
decide if that is an approach you agree with.  Get the Solaris FAQ and
read through it.

Linux clearly wins in "packaged admin tools".  If you want a feel-good
system administration frontend, Solaris won't give it to you.

Once upon a time the old saw was "all the world's a VAX".  Now it seems
like "all the world's a Linux/gcc system".  If you go to Solaris, you will
probably find yourself periodically cursing out idiot software developers
that never bothered to test anything under any platform other than
Linux/gcc/x86.  I don't necessarily find this to be bad, it helps give me
incentive to look for projects that actually take the time to work on
porting an interoperability.

> slightly hesitant about having a main server running an OS I don't
> understand that well.  Also is there any truth in the claims that UltraLinux
> runs fast on Sun machines than Solaris does?

It really depends on what you are doing.

In terms of kernel overhead per syscall, Linux beats out nearly everyone.
In terms of native hardware feature support, Solaris/SPARC wins here.  In
terms of performance while the system is under heavy I/O load, it can go
either way.  Systems with lots of processors and resource contention will
benefit notably from Solaris.

Truly CPU-bound tasks will not see a difference either way.

> It was mainly as a back up and a way of testing things out.  Have got PCs to
> net boot but was a bit hesitant about having to cross compile / set up
> complete kernel / root fs.

Solaris is trivial to netboot.  Linux distributions for SPARC also seem to
be set up for easy netbooting.

-James