On Sunday 25 June 2006 19:02, 张韡武 wrote: > Thank you for the answer. Just another smaller question: from pruely a > user's view (who simply wish to use it, rather then from developer > view who might gain knowledge and fun doing it), is it worthy to try > it (64bit sparc)? > > The original idea is the system as a print server is too slow (capable > of doing fast dithering for the inkjet printer, but not fast enough to > do real-time even-tone dithering to server the printer, usually cause > printer to wait for server), a rough gain of 20% to 30% CPU power, by > my guessing of observing top(1), should be enough for the printer. > Dithering is always a CPU intensive job and we do a lot of printing. > > I observed kernel is taking only a very small percentage of CPU usage, > if I try hours to get 64-bit kernel running but only obtain 5% speed > gain, that may not be worth. Or should I try Solaris 10? Should > Solaris provide better performance in this very case? (how much > performance gain might happen? 10%? 20%?) I don't need a very close > estimation, just if someone can give me a very rough estimation is > very helpful, for I am not techincally able to do the decision:) > > If switch to Solaris for performance (no offensive, I am a 5 year's > hardcore Linux user), generally speaking, is Solaris very compatible > with PCI cards like NEC USB controller, Promise IDE controller and > ethernet cards?
Well, I'm not a sparc dev so probably I cannot give you the most accurate answer you could get; moreover, I cannot speak about solaris since I don't know it. Anyway... >From what I've read, the main reason gentoo stays 64 bit kernel/32 bit userland is that switching to a full 64 bit system (perhaps with multilib) will not be a considerable improvement, but rather just a waste of memory. This is different from what happens in the x86 world, where being 64-bit means getting a lot of benefits (like, for example, many more cpu registers). In the sparc world, for an userland app "being 64-bit" means, basically, "wasting more memory" (due to larger executables binaries). In short, I think that (from the pure user's view you were talking about), it's not worth trying. However, I believe that a (highly experimental) userland 64-bit profile exists (but of course don't expect that to work flawlessly or to be usable in a production environment). Read this thread on the forums, which explains all: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-442194.html btw, AFAIK solaris uses a similar 64bit-kernel/32bit-userland approach (or, at least, *most* of the userland is 32bit). Hope this helps (and please somebody correct me if what I said is wrong). -- [email protected] mailing list
