[rescue] Sun T2000 latest OBP image?

[Meelis Roos]

> >>> The version of OBP that I had on some of my T2000s that was dated in 2005
> >>> didn't seem to boot Debian successfully.
> >>
> >> That's a feature. Running Linux on perfectly good SPARC hardware? Heresy!
> > 
> > It could be worse. I could be trying to run Solaris on it. ;-)
> 
>   At least it would be fast. ;)
> 
>   But to be fair, I haven't seen Linux on SPARC in many, many years.
> How well does it take advantage of the hardware these days?

My first test was in Sun Blade 100 timeframe. Back then, sparclinux was 
winning over Solaris 8 in OS-level microbenchmarks (most things lmbench 
measured, and especially noticeable when linking big programs) but Linux 
GUI was noticably slower. Most of Linux userland was v8 compoatible back 
then (v9 long since) so I remmeber recompiling X and some libs with 
proper cpu type. X got faster but not as slick as in Solaris, but on the 
other hanf, I could watch fullscreen movies using ATI Mach 64 video 
overlay in Linux while it was hopelessly slow in Solaris.

Over the years I have seen benchmarks both ways - some favor Solaris, 
some Linux. Latest difference was in 10G saturation and IOMMU locking 
where Linux was slower until it was fixed.

Current Linux kernel has different CPU-specific optiozations onf may 
lowlevel routings for U1, U3, Niagara1..Niagara4, also makes use of the 
builtin crypto in newer CPUs.

Hmm, it would be interesting to install Solaris on a spare disk in T2000 
and run some bencharks.

What would be good realistic benchmarks that are applicable to both and easy to run?

And, should I run single-disk Solaris on ZFS or journaled UFS for this?

Also, what is the latest freely available Solaris and does it let me 
publish the benchmarks?

-- 
Meelis Roos (mroos at linux.ee)