I recently set up IDL (commercial s/w like Mathimatica) to run inside a Linux zone to work around a lack of Solaris x86 platform support. So this is another possibility for commercial software like that.
The biggest issue that I've seen so far between building and running science applications on sparc and x86, aside from infrequent endian issues, is that often 64 bit support is very solid for sparc, but either doesn't exist, or is unstable, for x86. This is true of open source programs as well as closed source ones, and is a symptomatic result of Sun being ahead of the curve on 64 bit computing compared to other OS vendors. For sparc, this is worth checking out if you're wanting a new gcc & performance: http://cooltools.sunsource.net/gcc/ This improves GCC's otherwise generalist performance results, but overall the Sun compilers do a lot better job if you can use them. Since the Sun compilers work under Linux too, you don't have to sacrifice portability and performance. Tim -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
