[rescue] advice on rescuing an e10k

[Andrew Gaylard]

On 10/23/06, Andrew Weiss <ajwdsp at cloud9.net> wrote:
>
> On Oct 20, 2006, at 4:24 AM, Andrew Gaylard wrote:
>
> > If it makes any difference, I'd prefer to go with Linux on it
> > instead of
> > Solaris.
> >
> Why would you run Linux on big Sun iron that is current?  You can't
> get anywhere near the maximum use of that hardware nor can you get
> the scalability.


Is Solaris really that much faster on this hardware? And what do
you mean by "maximum use of the hardware" and "scalability"?
And what in particular makes it faster? (A better kernel?  Better
compiler?  Something else?)  I'm not disputing this, I'm just curious
to know.

If Solaris really is, say, 10%+ faster than Linux, then I'd happily use it.
I was planning to use Gentoo Linux; I've found that compiling for a
particular
CPU does give a noticible speed improvement over vanilla distributions.
This is of course most obvious on register-starved arches like i386 -> P4,
but does also help (though not as much) on SPARC, HPPA, and Alpha.

My main reason for using Linux is that the app I need isn't ported to
Solaris, and when I tried to do the port myself, it wasn't simple.
For instance, Solaris doesn't have
    fnctl( fd, O_ASYNC, ...)

Andrew.