[geeks] OS for an Ultra 2

[Jochen Kunz]

On Tue, 27 Jun 2006 17:01:39 -0400
Charles Shannon Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com> wrote:

> The alternative is to keep using NetBSD, moving up to version 3. The
> caveat is that its SMP support is not as good, though perhaps it is
> good enough.
NetBSD 3.0 (as well as -current) sparc64 (UltraSPARC) doesn't support
SMP at all. There is some work, but progress is slow due to lack of man
power. SMP on sparc (SPARC V7 / V8) works pretty well for two or three
years now.

> I gather mostly it is just not as fine-grained, but should be reliable
> now.
Well. NetBSD is a volunteer project of a "few" people. It got SMP a few
years back. Solaris / SunOS got SMP about 15 years back and is supported
by a large company that can afford to pay many full time developers. So
no surprise which system has more elaborate SMP...

For the Ultra 2: If it has only one CPU or only a few MBs of RAM I would
go with NetBSD. If it has two CPUs and enough RAM, Solaris will do a
better job.
--


tsch|_,
       Jochen

Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/