Re: Which Sparc is best?
* Craig Morehouse <craigm@gdi.net> [020723 20:19]:
> We had some early Blades last year, and I really thought that a dual
> CPU Ultra2 was a better box.
Based on my experience with the machines I have run Linux on (many of
the 32-bit sparc systems, U1, U10, AX, AXi, AX1105), I'd have to say
that a U1 E-model is probably about as low you'd wanna go.
I had my fiancee using an SS20 with a 8MB CG14, a bunch of RAM, and two
SM71's (75MHz, 1MB ecache) for a web/email machine... it was just too
slow. Putting in a quicker turbo gx+ for a framebuffer would have
reduced it to 8-bit video, which was also unacceptable. The system is
also slightly slower than my U1/170E... and considering I see the
U1/170E selling on ebay for around $125 makes it a trivial choice to go
at least with that.
The original U1s have no UPA slot, 10Mbit ethernet and narrow SCSI...
the E-models have a UPA slot (for a Creator 2D/3D FB), 100Mbit enet and
wide SCSI. The U2s also have those features found on the U1 E-models.
The U5 and U10 are decent machines... moreso on the systems with the 2MB
ecache (most of the U10s, and some of the U5s). One problem with those
systems is that they have a CMD646U for an EIDE controller... a buggy
chipset that Linux deals with poorly (mostly due to CMD's lack of desire
to cooperate, I hear).
All in all, I think I'd have to say that the U1/E, U2, U30 and U60 are
you best bets. I'd also recommend going with Creator 3D framebuffers in
'em... not the Elite3D unless you wanna load some proprietary firmware
to get decent performance.
> Does Debian install nicely on the Ultra 5's and 10's? As you said,
> there are plenty of 10's around at nice prices.
It should install quite nicely on both of them... and the above
mentioned systems. If you're going to maintain a lab of them, then I'd
suggest setting yourself up with a local debian mirror to save
bandwidth, and to netboot your systems the installation.
Just in case... dpkg --get-selections and --set-selections are you
friends. :)
> Another question... Are there any Package disadvantages in using a
> Sparc over an Intel box using Debian? Is the same range of Debian
> software available for all CPU's?
With the exception of non-free software... Adobe Acrobat, etc., it's
pretty much the same. Besides the occasional bug of something that
needs something like an endian or byte-alignment fix (getting more and
more rare these days), the only issue I see is that Debian/SPARC is
compiled for the lowest common denominator... the sun4c/sparcv7 systems.
Those don't have the integer multiply and divide instructions... the
only place I've noticed it is in using sshd, as it uses libssl (which
apparently does a lot of integer multiplication and/or division). For
the most part, fortunately, this won't be much of an issue.
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