Sparc vs. slink (minimal configuration)
I recently acquired some hardware being retired from work, including a
genuine Sun SPARCstation 1+ and a 486 system, so I ordered copies of the
slink distro from Linux Central. Installation went smoothly on the 486,
but it's been a different story on the Sun. :-(
First, the installation took from Sunday afternoon to Wednesday evening!
Admittedly, whenever i went to sleep or work, and returned, it was usually
(but not always) waiting for keyboard input, but still that seems rather
excessively slow.
Once the installation finished, the system was essentially unusable. After
getting down into single user mode (which took quite awhile), it finally
responded to a 'w' command (with nothing but the header, as expected), and
"time w" gave the following values:
20.822 real
0.150 user
11.660 system
Are these reasonable values for this hardware and the default slink kernel?
Here's the values from "cat /proc/cpuinfo" before going to single user
(typed in from notes):
cpu: Fujitsu MB86900/1A or LSI L64831 SparcKIT-40
fpu: Weitek WTL3170/2
promlib: Version 2 Revision 2
prom: 2.9
type: sun4c
ncpus probed: 1
ncpus active: 1
BogoMips: 24.88
vacsize: 65536 bytes
vachwflush: no
vaclinesize: 16 bytes
mmuctxs: 8
mmupsegs: 128
kernelpsegs: 32
kfreepsegs: 0
usedpsegs: 47
ufreepsegs: 14
user_taken: 0
max_taken: 20
context: 64064 flushes
segment: 631568 flushes
page: 4251796 flushes
Even while typing at the command prompt in single user mode, the system
would pause and not echo the keyboard for several seconds at a time rather
frequently. Switching between virtual consoles felt like it was working
"normally" without any unexpected delay, but everything else felt
*extremely* sluggish.
The machine has 64MB of RAM with a 25MHz processor, and about 50MB of swap
space allocated on the surviving original SUN0207 disk. (root occupies the
rest of that disk.) /usr, /var, and /home are allocated in separate
partitions on an external disk.
Is this system just too old and slow to run Linux reasonably, or is there
something pathological going on? It had been running SunOS 4.1.3_U1
(slowly but) steadily for the last several years. I can reinstall SunOS if
I have to, :-( but would much prefer Linux if at all possible. :-)
For what it's worth, my bedroom (aka the "Computer Museum") is upstairs,
and the temperature during the day is usually in the mid- to upper- 80's.
That may improve if i can get a promised window unit. After completing a
Ph.D. in fault tolerant computing several years ago, I'm well aware that
higher temperatures are not good for electronics. :-)
--
Stephen McConnel email: steve@acadcomp.sil.org
Academic Computing Department or steve@mcconnel.ac.sil.org
Summer Institute of Linguistics or Stephen_McConnel@sil.org
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Road phone: (972)708-7361
Dallas, TX 75236 U.S.A. fax: (972)708-7363
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