[rescue] sparc10 cpu - what to do.

[Dave McGuire]

On 12/17/2016 05:49 PM, Sandwich Maker wrote:
> the first ss10 i saw - about '91 - shipped with 16M.  my ss2 came with
> 4M, or maybe less.  okay, 384M is also small by today's rules, but
> 16M?  cpus have more cache than that now.

  Yeah seriously.  It's truly amazing how far we've come.

> " > the sunos kernel was optimized for memory in the single-digits of MB.
> " > the script calculates and resets several variables in either kmem,
> " > vmunix, or both.  it can be run on a running machine.  i don't know if
> " > you'll get a perceptible, or even measurable, speedup.
> " 
> "   Most of these are calculated from the kernel build tunable MAXUSERS,
> " usually right near the top of a BSD kernel configuration file.  That
> " variable set the sizes of a great many things in a kernel built from
> " that config file.  I think most of those tunables you're talking about
> " are the runtime-settable subset of those, and yes, they can have a
> " profound and visible impact on overall system performance.
> 
> solaris has this, or something like it, but iirc sunos didn't.

  Actually it does; this was in straight BSD.  SysV-based OSs did it
very differently.  If you remember the BSD kernel configuration
files...DEC's Ultrix has this (though they're usually generated by an
autoconfigurator in Ultrix, they don't have to be), and (at least)
NetBSD still does it this way.  The MAXUSERS parameter has long since
been removed in modern BSD, but in old BSD it was used to size lots of
things in the kernel during the build process.

> " > i also have a ksh function which assists in calculating disk partition
> " > tables for the cylinder-boundary metaphor, still needed as late as s8
> " > but really obsolete in the zbr era.  have late-model solarii given up 
> " > on it yet?
> " > 
> " > anyone interested in them?
> " 
> "   I'm interested.  The new exhibit floor is going to have a lot of early
> " Sun hardware running, and the majority of it will be running SunOS.
> 
> here they are, with notes following.
...

  Great stuff, thanks!

          -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA