Re: tlug: Sparc RedHat 5.1 tidbits

[Christopher Sekiya <wileyc@example.com>]

On Sun, 28 Jun 1998, Jonathan Byrne wrote:

> So based on the results of your digging, would you recommend 4.2 or 5.1
> to a person relatively new to UNIX and completely new to Sparc who is
> going to set up his first Sparcstation this summer? 

I can't speak to the superiority of 5.1 over 4.2 (or vice versa), as I
haven't actually installed 5.1 on any of my machines -- I simply grabbed
the kernel and glibc source packages and installed from there[1].

Hardware sphere -- the kernel is really a 2.1 series kernel (as far as the
hardware model is concerned). Your SS1+ is a sun4c.  The "true" 2.0-series
kernels had problems with sun4c machines -- would slow down to a crawl
after a couple hours of use.  2.1 fixed this, so the 5.1 kernel might do
better for you out of the box[2].

However, you may have problems with your SCSI subsystem.  I have not as
yet experienced any fatal errors, but the fact that the SCSI driver gives
up while it attempts to determine block size is reason for concern.  I'm
trying to track it down, but I'll be willing to bet that the RedHat guys
will find the problem before I do ;)

Software sphere -- well, it's glibc-2.0.7[3].  My feelings about HJ's libc
are pretty much common knowledge.  From a dev perspective, the glibc
included in RH-5.1 is somewhat lacking (but I think those are just
packaging problems, nothing fatal) ... and they got their version out
before I did, so I can't fault them.

Performance sphere -- there is a definite performance increase with
binaries linked against glibc on both of my sparc boxen.  Apparent speed
increase of at least 10%.  YMMV.

So, bottom line?  Install 5.1 and ignore the SCSI problems if they occur.


--	Chris (wileyc@example.com)

[1] ... however, everything else is just user-space stuff, right?  The
    true merits of a sparc distro is in its kernel and libc.
 
[2] I don't remember if the SS1+ was affected by the slowdown ... some
    sun4c boxes fell victim, some didn't.  The SS2 did not, but the [IS]LC
    did.

[3] Which is really, really bizarre.  The glibc-2.0 branch didn't have
    much in the way of sparc32 support -- I'd been working against the 2.1
    branch, with some headway.  Then out of nowhere comes a 400Kb patch
    credited to David Miller that gets glibc-2.0 most of the way there ...
    for the sparc code guys out there, I recommend that you take a look at
    "sparc.patch" and "sparc2.patch" -- interesting reading.

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