[rescue] The time has come, the walrus said

[Michael-John Turner]

On Fri, Apr 22, 2005 at 05:02:13PM -0500, Mike Parson wrote:
> My choice for an OS would be NetBSD.  Freely available, easily tuned to
> your needs, pkgsrc makes getting the packages you need easy enough.  And
> since 2.0, NetBSD/sparc supports SMP.

Couldn't agree with you more - all of my 32-bit sparcs run NetBSD. I
recently setup an Axil 320 (SS20 clone) with a pair of SM61s and am very
impressed with its performance with NetBSD 2.0.2.  Admittedly, I'm probably
easy to impress (I still use an O2 as my workstation)... 

> As far as mixing your SM81 and SM71 processors, there have been rumors
> of people doing this under Solaris, but I've never personally seen it
> happen.

I tried mixing an SM50 and SM61, but didn't have any luck with NetBSD
recognising the second CPU (it couldn't spin it up). Apparently the rule is
that different speeds can be mixed, as long as both CPUs have cache (the
SM50 doesn't have cache hence it not working for me) and as long as the
slower CPU is in the first MBus slot.

> rrdtool, mrtg, snort, etc, all available.

Yep, NetBSD pkgsrc has most of the major software available, and if it's
not, you can probably ask the pkgsrc-wip participants to build a package
for you.

-mj
-- 
Michael-John Turner | http://mj.turner.org.za/
mj at turner.org.za    | Open Source in WC ZA - http://www.clug.org.za/