Re: Boot procedure on old SPARCs
Sabino Maggi <maggi@ien.it> wrote:
> > How much memory do these machines have ? My advice is:
> > <= 16 Mb , Sun4c, go for NetBSD, it really shines.
> > => 32 Mb , Sun4m, go for Debian, it rocks.
> > 16-32 Mb, toss a coin...
>
> Do you mean:
> <= 16 Mb _AND_ Sun4c, go for...
> or <= 16 Mb _OR_ Sun4c, go for..., etc?
>
> I am interested because I have some Sun4c machines with 16/32 Mb of RAM,
> and I would like to revive them.
Sorry, my mesg was a bit unclear..
Generally, for a low memory machine (like 16Mb) AND especially
the Sun4c arch. I've noticed that NetBSD runs much smoother.
For one thing, the VM system in the linux/sparc kernel < 2.4 does not
perform very well on the Sun4c (IIRC because of no mmu..).
And another thing is that Debian's dpkg/dselect database and
packaging system really eats memory and cpu.
Of course, you don't have to install/upgrade all the time and
you can download packages and install them manually, but, well...
Which way to go probably depends on the intended use of the
machines. For non-interactive stuff and the like the difference
in speed might be negligeable.
We have both Debian and NetBSD boxes here and they really rock in their
intended use. Debian with lots of apps in powerful SS5's and
NetBSD on the memory starved ELC serving static web pages and acting
as a master backup machine ;)
HTH,
--
Ragga
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