FreeBSD 5.2.1 On SPARC64 87
JigSaw writes "FreeBSD has a solid reputation in terms of features and performance on x86, powering sites from Hotmail to Yahoo, yet it doesn't tend to be the first (or even second) OS that comes to mind with many people when thinking of Solaris alternatives for the SPARC platform. Tony Bourke tests FreeBSD 5.2.1 on his SPARC machine."
Tier 1 and no video, and server only? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm currently running gentoo on my sunblade 100. Since both netbsd and FreeBSD doesnt support video, only serial connections. I had a hella of a time looking for another OS besides Solaris, and Gentoo was the most up2date one I found. SuSE/Redhat dropped support years ago.
I had to drop SuSE, and switch to Gentoo for a newer kernel and true framebuffer support on my Sunblade. Also the binary packages for the Sparc 2004 is done, so you can install a sparc 5/20 without compiling. (I was told sparc-2004 was done last week on #gentoo-sparc on freenode irc network, but have not confirmed it.) Going to put Gentoo on my Sparc 20.
Also, the article shows they tested the 2.4 linux kernel, would be nice to see how 2.6 on sparc performs. I havn't tried 2.6 yet, as its still development on sparc.
Re:Tier 1 and no video, and server only? (Score:5, Interesting)
I've also got a bunch of ISO's here at present for BSD (Net/Open/Free) on sparc64, so my next thought is to try out FreeBSD. This article therefore is a welcome and timely suprise.
Consider NetBSD too (Score:5, Interesting)
Which brings up a point: both NetBSD/Sparc and NetBSD/Sparc64 will run on an Ultra 1, which is a 64 bit machine. Why doesn't somebody install each NetBSD port on two seperate Ultra 1 machines. Then the benchmark comparision can be between the normal apps that build on both systems, running in parallel on two identical systems. Its exactly the same codebase except for the 32 or 64 bittedness.
Who cares (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Woohoo for FreeBSD (Score:3, Interesting)
Running it here... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:learn from your mistakes please (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, you can pkg_add http://URL, and it will automatically fetch dependent packages, but the problem is, you need to know the exact url. Package name, package version,
I suppose I will be doing some work in this area with NetBSD packages collection (pkgsrc) [pkgsrc.org], but that should be easily portable to FreeBSD and OpenBSD ports. The whole idea is, that if you generate an index file for all binary packages on the site. Information would include the description, requirements, size - pretty much everything found in +* files (+DESCR, +COMMENT, +PLIST and other) - perhaps I could use Berkeley DB format for it. Then, in an user-level utility, you just need to give one URL to fetch that description file (bzipped, of course). Then, such utility could work much like Debian's apt-get and apt-cache - a frontend to pkg_add and a quick way to browse all available, but uninstalled software. We'd have a friendly utility for new users for all BSDs.
Also, as pkgsrc is portable [pkgsrc.org] and there are already binary packages avialable for Linux [netbsd.org] (not to mention NetBSD, of course) from the latest branch of pkgsrc -- we'd just need to add that small utility to bootstrap binary kit for pkgsrc, and you'd have then binary pkgsrc available for your box -- pretty much for all Linux distributions. These are all cool projects, and they can give you perhaps much more, than some Linux distributions (especially those ones, who "lock" user in a maze of incompatible binary packages and their dependencies
And, perhaps, if FreeBSD Ports not impress you, when compared to Gentoo, perhaps you should try then NetBSD packages collection [pkgsrc.org]. Maybe the number of operating systems and platforms will somehow impress you, it impress me for sure. Of course, there are bigger and smaller problems, as they always are, in any opensource product, but perhaps with more users activley contributing to the project (just by testing the packages -- that's just using some of your CPU cycles on pkgsrc, instead SETI@Home
BSD? Dead? I don't think so. There's massive active development going on in all areas of each of the BSDs, there are thousands of lines of code shared among developers, lot of new ideas submited, lots of problems solved. There are a lot of companies and sites using it (among others, About.com, Yahoo!, distributed.net, Juniper, NASA)... Check uptime stats on Netcraft [netcraft.com] itself, FreeBSD rules in the top ten.
Its just perhaps BSD people are usually too busy doing their projects to comment here, so you can get a false impression
Have a nice day!
Pity it's only SPARC64... (Score:4, Interesting)
...because I only have Sun/Texas Instruments SPARC boxen, no Fujitsus around here I'm afraid.
Oh, I see, they mean SPARCv9. Why couldn't they say so? Given the number of manufacturers who make SPARC [sparc.com] processing units it's a bit of a shame that many Open Source projects only claim to support the one manufacturer's chips.
BTW has anyone got any experiences of running this on TI UltraSPARC IV machines that they'd like to share?