> Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2002 09:36:27 -0800 > From: Tim Hockin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> I'm curious as to why those are "more serious" that > Linux/x86. Please enlighten me. STFW or, as Jeff suggested, speak to some Sun gurus. The Linux codebase is more fragmented than BSD. True, there are distributions, but packages are _not_ designed with one another in mind. Do a Google search to see what's required to run a Linux 2.4 kernel. Linux having /bin and /sbin binaries depend on dynamic linking is stupid. Static linking might make the system a couple megabytes larger, but anyone who's ever screwed up libc can appreciate system binaries that don't require it. Various BSD flavors are designed together as a total system. For upgrades, cvsup and "make world" are your friends. Think early 80s GM cars where one group designed the engine, one penned the body, another came up with the trannie, etc. Things just didn't go together smoothly. Thinks Windows and DLL Hell. Solaris? I'd say that the crown jewel is fine-grained ACLs. FreeBSD will have those (POSIX.1e-style) in release 5, but Solaris has had them for some time. Beyond that, it's more of all being designed as a system, as with BSD. UltraSPARC chips have great FPU performance, nice bus bandwidth, and (IMHO) the SPARC ISA is much cleaner than the x86 ISA. If compilers ever start really using the VIS instructions (better thought out than MMX from what I've seen), that should really help improve performance. Integrated systems with _real_ self checks make Sun gear much nicer than most off-the-shelf x86 parts. LOM and ASR are nice. Up to 2 MB cache on US/IIi should speak for itself. Having POST on serial console is handy. Lots of little things add up. As someone with eight years Linux experience and a paltry two or three under BSD, I moved from Linux to BSD. I'm not just a newcomer to Linux bashing it. Similar story for x86 and SPARC. I can't believe that I'm trying to tell someone with a sun.com address benefits of Solaris and SME gear over competitors... this worries me greatly. Now I'm curious: What makes x86/Linux any more serious than SPARC, BSD, Solaris, et cetera? Low price (could be fixed if SME had higher volume via Cobalt) and sheep flock to "what I've heard of"? Intel sells people high-end chips and MBs because people are drawn in at a low level. Why can't Sun do the same? I'm not saying to ditch x86/Intel, but maybe to offer a RaQ running on BSD, Solaris, or the UltraSPARC. Ah well. That's 2 of 2 Sun Cobalt people indicating no interest in supplanting x86/Linux. I'd hoped that some developers would chime in re interest in something different. I guess I was wrong. Quote from Sun employee: "I'm curious as to why [UltraSPARC and Solaris] are 'more serious' than Linux/x86? Please enlighten me." There goes the company. (Honestly. That's immortalized in archives across the globe!) I hate to admit it, but maybe Paul Jacobs is right about Sun's future. I'm beginning to see Sun as the next Commodore: Great products, no marketing. I'm not complaining though. If Sun falters and enterprises start having fire sales on big SMP UltraSPARC servers, I know what I'll be buying. :-) Eddy Brotsman & Dreger, Inc. - EverQuick Internet Division Phone: +1 (316) 794-8922 Wichita/(Inter)national Phone: +1 (785) 865-5885 Lawrence -- Date: Mon, 21 May 2001 11:23:58 +0000 (GMT) From: A Trap <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Please ignore this portion of my mail signature. These last few lines are a trap for address-harvesting spambots. Do NOT send mail to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, or you are likely to be blocked. _______________________________________________ cobalt-developers mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://list.cobalt.com/mailman/listinfo/cobalt-developers
