On 6/5/07, Brian Hechinger <wonko at 4amlunch.net> wrote: > On Tue, Jun 05, 2007 at 03:19:53PM -0700, John Sonnenschein wrote: > > I've got a mac mini, and I've just bought an IBM pseries from ebay > > ( 44p-170, an old 333mhz POWER3 64-bit machine) > > I've been meaning to snag a 44p, but I am just not all that interested > in throwing myself into AIX again. Now, if I could run Solaris on one > of those? I'd be at paypal paying for the auction *right now*. ;)
Well, in fairness they'll run open/netBSD and linux as well ( though mine will be getting AIX at first just to play with ) > > Personally, I think IBM POWER hardware is the most logical target, > > I agree. > > > since it'd be nice if the port would run on machines still in > > production, however they do happen to be alternately expensive or rare. > > Not nessesarily. If you work in a shop where big kit isn't something you > cringe from (like I wish we would be here) then if it's a toss up between > current gen SPARC and current gen POWER, I'd buy a new sexy POWER6 box in > a heartbeat over a SPARC box, and I'm a SPARC fanatic. ;) I meant expensive from an end-user/hobbyist/developer perspective. The sorts of people who'd do things like port solaris to PPC for no money, just fun > > For a first step, 32-bit macppc hardware is the easiest & cheapest to > > find ( old g4's aren't too expensive anymore ) and the most likely to > > attract more developers. Even if most of us have genesi hardware, new > > blood would have a hard time getting ahold of it > > > > thoughts ? > > I think you last point is the best one. Yes, 44p-170s aren't all that > expensive these days, but G4 and dual G4 macppc boxes are cheap and > plentiful. I'd certainly have a much better chance of being able to > justify something like that for home than a slower, older POWER box. > Not that I wouldn't mind a nice POWER box to replace my aging 591, but > they are certainly not as cheap at the same performance level. > > My U80 rocks hard, but it's getting a bit long in the tooth. A nice > dual G4 running Solaris would be an interesting alternative (or extra, > I'm certainly not decomissioning the U80 anytime soon, it's a workhorse). > A spankin' G5 would be better of course. ;) Indeed, but macPPC is dead, so it'll slowly dwindle out of existence. Hence why I think we should aim for targeting in-production machines ( namely, the IBM iron, since solaris doesn't scale down very well, but it scales up fantastically ) -- PGP Public Key 0x437AF1A1 Availiable on hkp://pgp.mit.edu
