Re: Is anything else then Solaris used on UltraSparc Machines.

From: Thomas Maier-Komor (maierkom_at_lpr.e-technik.no-spam.tu-muenchen.de)
Date: 11/28/05 

Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 14:58:08 +0100

Dave wrote:
> The support for Linux hardware is *far* more complete.
>
well Linux has had some more years of development concerning
supported hardware. But I guess Solaris/x86 will catch up.
They are just not there right now, just like Linux isn't there
in other areas (e.g. binary compability, good nfs support,
scalability, real-time support, standards compliance, volume
management, stable driver api, ...)

>
> Sure there is a lot of pre-packaged software of Solaris, but much less
> than for Linux.
>
> Personally I prefer builing from source the vast majority of the time.
>

So why do you actually ask for them if you do compile them yourself
anyway? What are you missing on the default installation?

>>> * Many test their open-source software on Linux and ignore Solaris so
>>> building on Solaris can be more troublesome.
>>
>>
>> That is indeed a sad thing.
>
>
> Sad mabe, but still true. Death is sad, but you can't ignore it.
>
>> But one has to say that any software that
>> should be able to run on anything _else_ than Linux, will easily run
>> under Solaris, as Linux has always been closely related and inspired
>> by Solaris.
>
>
> Yes, but it is often more hassle on Solaris (even SPARC). It is just not
> tested as much by the open-source community, so the small details are
> not noticed.
>
> I've even seen one arrogant person saying as long as his software worked
> on Redhat 8 or later, that was good enough and that people should upgrade!!
>

Yes, I know this kind of people. They live on their own island and they
don't care about the real-world problems other people are
experiencing...

>
> When I tried installing Mathematica, it would not work on Debian Linux.
> It is only supposed to support Redhat and Suse. I did not persist any
> more - installing on Windoze was another easy option, as I had a windoze
> box on my desk too.
>
That's exactly what I meant. But maybe we will get the same kind of
problems like Linux on Solaris if the number of distros grow and their
compability declines...

>
> I don't think there is any reason the above 3 bits of software could not
> be ported to Solaris x86. Matlab is a number crunching program, so
> should recompile I expect for Solaris x86, given they produce Solaris
> SPARC versions.

Tell the vendor of the software. Ask your reseller. Post a comment in
their forums. Software vendors tend to support their product only on
the plattforms users asks for. If noone asks for it they won't offer it.
Linux was supported by almost nobody some years ago. Support for
Solaris/x86 isn't currently that bad. E.g. Oracle is now offering
their stuff.

>
>> And SPARC workstations offer a lot of functionality most PCs will never
>> have.
>
>
> Such as ??? I can't see what SPARC *workstations* offer than PCs will
> never have. I would have said reliability, as PCs can be pretty
> unreliable. But the better quality PCs (Compaq, better Dells) are pretty
> good.
>

If you are a software developer you will like bcheck, cputrack, cpustat,
and so on. E.g. bcheck is only supported on SPARC, because it requires
support of the processor that the x86 architecture does not offer.

What I also like is having a serial console to debug a machine that is
making trouble. If your PC is going insane you have little to no chances
to find out what is causing a problem. The SPARC workstations have a
good number of built-in test equipment to find out what is causing
a problem.

Concerning performance, it is true that the SPEC benchmark suite isn't
really fast on SPARC. But have you ever used Sun Studio on SPARC? I am
still waiting to see another compiler that builds a debug version of
a program as fast as this beast. In my experience it is a factor of
three compared at the same number of MHz compared to gcc. And using Sun
Studio you can distribute your build across many machines. Doing the
same thing with gnu make and gcc is hard work.

> Personally I think Sun have lost there way with SPARC in the workstation
> market. Servers is a different matter altogether.
>
Could be. I don't have any numbers.

> I'll take your bet!! You name any amount you want.

;-) I would be glad if I had one, too...

>
>>> Any OS is an island in
>>
>> some way. You can do certain things very good, others fine and some
>> simply won't work.
>
>
> True, but Linux is a bigger island than Solaris x86.

That depends of the kind of problem you have to solve. Linux also
started as a very small island and has grown the last years very fast.
I think Solaris/x86 has good chances of doing this, too. There is
a good number of people with Solaris knowledge out there who would
rather prefer to use Solaris/x86 for many applications than Linux.
E.g. concerning documentation, patch and release management I don't
know any Linux distributor who can match the quality delivered by
Sun. Especially doku....

>
>> IMO your best bet is to use everything you can get a grip on
>
>
> Well if you are reasonably intelligent and take the time, you can
> probably get a grip on most things. But that is not a reason for using
> them all.

Well sometimes one has to work. But sometimes there is time to try
something new.

>
>
>> and monitor
>> the changes and the improvements that are going on. If you are
>> developing software you should cross-check it on another operating
>> system _and_ architecture with different endian anyway...
>
>
> I do that myself. Take a look at
>
> http://atlc.sourceforge.net/
>
> which I wrote. I have personally tested it on Solaris (both x86 and
> SPARC), HP-UX, AIX, IRIX, UNICOS, Tru64, NetBSD and a few Linux distros.
> Others have tested it on UNIXware, plus some other Linux distros. There
> are binaries for NetBSD on a wide range of hardware including the Sony
> Playstation 2 !! Windows binaries exist too, although these are not
> produced by me.
>

This is a nice number of supported systems. So we don't think so
different after all ;-)

The mad penguin called Linux has bitten me more than one time (e.g.
binary incompability breaking support of expensive commercial software,
lvm1 being incompatible to lvm2). Maybe that is the reason why I
currently prefer Solaris over Linux. But I also use Linux almost every
day, though much less than Solaris.

Cheers,
Tom

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