Re: sun4m and 2.4.x revisited
Simon Read wrote:
>
> > If it's an important part of your network, it doesn't seem to make
> > sense to risk significant down time and/or admin work to switch to
> > 2.4.
>
> Three reasons:
>
> My network is not a production network.
OK.
> > If it was a small amount of extra work, it would be done long before
> > now. I even compiled a few myself (had to fix a bunch of header
> > file problems) but they wouldn't boot. I've heard that very
> > recently the vger cvs tree has code that will boot and run but is
> > not ready for prime time.
>
> I don't believe this is necessarily the case. I still don't
> understand what the problem is, and therefore what work would need to
> be done to fix it. It honestly surprises me that it is easier to port
> a 32 bit kernel to a 64 bit machine than it is to a 32 bit one.
>
> For example, I don't understand the 'provenance' of the SPARC kernel
> code we use.
It is the case in this case. The thing is, sparc32 hardware is not
new-and-groovy. It's old and slow. People doing development on
this stuff understandably want to do it on machines that are fast
and young. Even ultra1's and ultra2's are 4+ years old, and they're
the slowest of the bunch, but still much faster than hypersparcs
even. If you were doing the development, which would you choose to
do first?
It's not a 32 bit kernel. It depends heavily on the arch. sparc64,
alpha, ia64 have a lot of 64 bit-ness in them.
a
Reply to: