[rescue] What Linux can run on Sun Fire V890 (UltraSparc IV+) server

[Joshua Boyd]

On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 10:07:03AM -0500, Jonathan J. M. Katz wrote:
> The OP (Aaron?) suggested he wanted a platform for ffmpeg and other fun
> things to (I assume) transcode video.
> 
> > something I can compile FFMPEG on, or run Blender on.
> 
> That said, I'm not sure why there isn't Solaris/Sparc support for those
> apps, especially given the VIS instruction set of the sparc CPUs. VIS is the
> Sparc analog of Intel's MMX. More info: http://www.sun.com/processors/vis/

There is support for Solaris/SPARC in those two programs.
http://download.blender.org/release/Blender2.49b/blender-2.49b-solaris-2.10-sparc_64-py2.5.tar.bz2

The recent Big Buck Bunny short film was rendered on Solaris (but
probably on AMD64 instead of SPARC) because Sun donated use of a large
Solaris cluster for the project.

And: Building ffmpeg on Solaris 10
http://chrismiles.livejournal.com/25439.html
 
> I'm not sure how well gcc can compile those apps for use with VIS.
> sunfreeware.com doesn't seem to have either blender or ffmpeg pre-compiled.
> Then again, Sun's compilers seem to be free for download these days, anyway,
> so that isn't much of an issue; you can use the Sun compiler and get the
> support for VIS (hopefully the compiler is smart enough and there doesn't
> need to be magic pixie dust in the code itself.)

I think that FFMpeg might have a little VIS optimization, while Blender
probably has none.