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

[Kurt Mosiejczuk]

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.

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.

> P.S.  careful about using SPARC/linux, SPARC international may come after
> you for (ab)using their registered trademark.

Shhhhhh... you weren't supposed to point that out =)

--Kurt