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snowsquirrel
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PostPosted: Thu Jul 29, 2004 8:06 pm    Post subject: what does linux give me that sparc does not? Reply with quote

I have used Linux at home for about 6 years now; Debian for 4, gentoo1, slack 1. I have been working at a solaris shop for the last 2 years. I have an Ultra 10 running Solaris 9 at home, which I use to work at home, as our data is endian sensitive.

I am considering install gentoo on the U10. To me, the main advantages are: larger package base, I am more familiar with linux admin. The disadvantages are: can't use Xsun, so that means monkeying with XF86Config for resolution changes etc, no dbx, sound system not as simple works.

From a user perspective, solaris and linux are pretty similar. It is the administration, and programming where the differences come in.

Is gentoo on sparc any faster than solaris? I would assume solaris 9 is already optimized for sparc.

What else am I missing. I am assuming most of the people running gentoo on sparcs, had run solaris on them at one time. what differences for or against have you noticed.

~S
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frankOnPPC
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 30, 2004 12:28 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

yes, i think its faster, using a ultra 5 and some other boxes.

it depends what you like to do ....
if you must have some commercial software like oracle avaiable for development, stay on solaris.

but to be honest, its cool to use linux om it, take a look how snappy linux is.

overall, it gives your a virtal live again.

if you have enough diskspace, feel free to install both and compare it by yourself.

For me, I'm got tired of all this different unix/derivatives, like MacOS X, Solaris, HP-US, AIX, Sinix a.s.o.
Linux is everywhere, runs everywhere,
shortly said, it is the future.
Gentoo could/will be part of it.

So the answer is easz, try it :/) come on, its not difficult,
and its (more or less) the same on PPC, Power, Sparc, Intel, AMD, MIPS, Alpha....

Solaris is just running on Sparc and AMD/Intel, possibly next time on Power/PPC.
I guess the game for Solaris is over, its going into a niche of realy big servers competing to its old pals like AIX, HP-UX, but also competing this growing (relativly) young guy called LINUX.

cheers,
Frank
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NewBlackDak
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PostPosted: Sat Jul 31, 2004 8:44 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I like Linux mostly cause I can have it running on a PC, a Mac, an ultra-sparc, and on equivalently configured machine a user cannot tell the difference.
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UltraSparc5 440 - sparcy
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bung-foo
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PostPosted: Sun Aug 01, 2004 1:13 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I use gentoo mostly because I know it and I'm comfortable with it. I ran Solaris 9 for a while but I had a hard time finding answers for my questions and it felt really slow. The gentoo community is why I use it on my sparc.


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Jester20
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PostPosted: Wed Aug 04, 2004 1:42 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I have a Ultra1 with dual 200s. When I bought the box, I ran solaris on it for about a week just "trying" to play with it, see the differences. I found that to be just different enough to piss me off.. but back to the topic, I then installed Gentoo. To me, Gentoo is very responsive in comparison. applications "seamed" to load faster. Like many others have said before "it feels snappier".
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rsborn
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PostPosted: Tue Aug 10, 2004 7:27 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I agree with what everybody else has said. I first installed Gentoo on an Ultra 10 and liked it so much I now have it on 2 along with a retired Pentium II box at work. It's really amazing how much faster Gentoo is compared to Solaris, even people hitting the Ultra 10 from a SSH session notice the difference.
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GenTimJS
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PostPosted: Tue Aug 17, 2004 11:47 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

the real issue is two fold

A) the kernel

B) the pork


The kernel you get with the solaris binary license program is pretty generic, and non-optimised your your specific CPU. Sun throws a kernel on the CD that will work on essentially -any- untrasparc, and is unoptimised in the same way macOS 8 was ... it had to run on M86K and PPC ... With gentoo, you get a kernel optimised for your specific system, and with the features you want. The solaris kernel has all kinds of support for firewire and other stuff you're not going to have or care about built-in. Your gentoo kernel (i hope) does not, and thus has a lower footprint, and seems faster.

The pork is also a BIG factor. I use solaris and gentoo on my Ultras, and with a solaris9 install you have to choose a pretty heavy-weight 2+gig install just to get stuff like cc and traceroute. You also get several kitchen sinks, drivers for hardware you've never even heard of, and enough auxilliary apps to run a small country for a few years. This considerably slows down boot and often other operations as well, somewhat of a DLL syndrome, tho I'd never compare sun to ms.

In the end, "what linux gives you" is customisation.
"what solaris gives you" is commercial UNIX apps like ProEnginner etc, CDE ( ..... ), and complete hardware/driver support for the entire UltraSparc line.

Each has its uses, imho.
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snowsquirrel
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PostPosted: Wed Aug 18, 2004 12:33 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I agree with the pork part. I always have to do the full install of solaris to get what I want. Plus the GNU utils such as ls, du, df, etc have more switches.

About kernel bloat I am not sure. While I am do agree that gentoo feels snappier than solaris, I believe solaris uses a microkernel, so that drivers that are not need are not loaded. Where as a linux (monolithic) kernel, has everything loaded. Linux's loadable modules make this area kind of grey, and am I am not sure if this argument stands up any more.

Thanks for replies,

~S
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cyan051
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PostPosted: Sat Aug 21, 2004 6:25 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

solaris and microkernel? thats maybe what sun wants u to belive...

i use solaris @work on every-day bases...and...
1. its slow...
2. its huge...i'm sorry to say that its even bigger bloatware than windows...
3. it still maganer to no filesystem to speak off...if u want anything remotely serious, u have to rely on veritas filesystem...

and yes, solaris kernel is without any platform optimizations - the same kernel runs on microsparc and latest ultrasparc iv chips...

it does have some major advantages if u go into enterprise waters (like domain support on e10k and newer systems).

linux is still young and doesn't have the features found in major commercial *nix flavours when it comes to enterprise usage, but for everyday user i see absolutely no reason why go with solaris...
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snowsquirrel
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PostPosted: Sat Aug 21, 2004 8:27 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I too use solaris everyday at work.

One thing that I do like about Solaris, want to change your monitor? Change it and restart Xsun. Want to add a dual head? add a second video card, and a monitor, and reboot. No dinking around with a xconfig file.

I agree Linux is leaner, and most distibutions are quite a bit ahead of solaris in terms of being up to date. Solaris still doesn't have a -h option for ls/du/df/etc. Little thinkgs like that are annoying.

ps - One other nice thing about Solaris on a U10, is that the mouse works! NOt on 2.6.6 Hopefully that will be fixed shortly.
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cyan051
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PostPosted: Sat Aug 21, 2004 9:01 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

i agree about x*.conf files...
it took nullification of GPL (sort of) from xfree for somebody to actually start working on x again...
i belive auto-generated xorg.conf is planned for near future...

regarding mouse on 2.6.6 - i assume u'r talking about x server...
well, the protocol changed from serial to ips2 :)) - yup, u have to change it in x*.conf

what i hold agaings solaris the most is forcing of backward-compatability...
c'mon, when a distribution is on 3 cds u can squize an optimized kernel for each cpu type :)

solaris 10 is almost out...and guess what? same story (ok, this time it does actually require a sun4u platform to install)...
sun is 2 busy playing with "marketing" stuff like their new 'n1 grid' stuff (where the hell did they find that name?)...

but that stuff sells on enterprise market - there nobody actually looks at kernel optimizations -if the system is 2 slow, just go and buy a bigger one...

(hell, i have new sun fire 25k cluster to play with next week)
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snowsquirrel
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PostPosted: Sat Aug 21, 2004 9:33 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I am hoping we get a rack of v240's soon. We have looked at Xeon and Opterons offerings, but we deal wil binary data that is natively Big Endian. That means rewriting portions of our software.

As for the mouse, I read that that it uses a PS2 driver now. I have tried /dev/psaux, /dev/mouse, /dev/input/mice, /dev/input/mouse0, all to no avail. Even cat /dev/mouse... won't give me anything. That is why I believe it is a kernel issue, not X.

My keyboard works, so I definitely have the sun serial driver working. But not my mouse. If you have a mouse working on a 2.6 kernel, Ultra 5/10, could you send or post your .config?

I get this in my dmesg:
mice: PS/2 mouse device common for all mice
input: Sun Mouse on su/serio0

btw - The mouse definitely works in Solaris. I
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cyan051
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PostPosted: Sat Aug 21, 2004 10:25 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

this is getting slightly offtopic...

btw, u cannot compare v240s with f25k machines :)
there is a difference in couple of zeroes in price (the latter are in 8 digit range (in EUR) when counting in the storage)

btw, getting back to opteron/xeon systems - i have no idea why would someone want to buy one from sun...u don't get any of the advantages and all of disadvangates or running solaris, all at huge price hike when compared to competition :(

and back to your mouse issues...r u running udev? if yes, your mouse should be /dev/input/mouse0 and protocol PS/2...

but if cat /dev/input/mouse0 gives u nothing then u r right - its a kernel problem, probably with serial driver - by looking at your dmesg output it looks like its binding mouse to a wrong serial driver...
if i'm not mistaking it should be sunzilog serial driver, so it should read
"input: Sun Mouse on zs/serio1"

check is if sunzilog is acutally starting twice - u should have something like:
SunZilog: 2 chips.
zs2 at 0x000001fff1000004 (irq = 12,7e8) is a SunZilog
zs3 at 0x000001fff1000000 (irq = 12,7e8) is a SunZilog

better yet, on u10 why do u have SU serial enabled in kernel at all?

my 'grep SERIAL .config' reads:
CONFIG_SERIAL_SUNCORE=y
CONFIG_SERIAL_SUNZILOG=y
CONFIG_SERIAL_SUNZILOG_CONSOLE=y
CONFIG_SERIAL_CORE=y
CONFIG_SERIAL_CORE_CONSOLE=y
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snowsquirrel
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PostPosted: Sat Aug 21, 2004 11:45 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I wasn't comparing an f25k to a rack of v240s, just hoping out loud we get some new toys soon.

As for the mouse, the help in the kernel configuration states that SUNSU is for PCI sun systems (ultra 10s are pci). But I am willing to try anything now.
I removed SUNSU support and added ZILOG, and removed serial mouse support, but the keyboard didn't work nor did the mouse.

dmesg | grep -i zilog
returned nothing, as did grep zs.

I am just recompiling now with SUNSU and ZILOG.
The keyboard worked but not the mouse. loading sermouse made a /dev/input/mouse0 entry, but cat /dev/input/mouse0 showed nothing same as psaux, input/mice.

If it is indeed no SUNSU, and added ZILOG to get my mouse working, I must have other kernel issues.
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