From owner-freebsd-sparc64@FreeBSD.ORG Mon Jan 11 19:51:51 2010 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-sparc64@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5503B106566C for ; Mon, 11 Jan 2010 19:51:51 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from j@uriah.heep.sax.de) Received: from uriah.heep.sax.de (uriah.heep.sax.de [213.240.137.9]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id EDD338FC08 for ; Mon, 11 Jan 2010 19:51:50 +0000 (UTC) Received: by uriah.heep.sax.de (Postfix, from userid 107) id 884A145; Mon, 11 Jan 2010 20:33:00 +0100 (MET) Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2010 20:33:00 +0100 From: Joerg Wunsch To: freebsd-sparc64@freebsd.org Message-ID: <20100111193300.GD49006@uriah.heep.sax.de> References: <4B4A6FA5.1010002@netscape.net> <4B4B6E37.3050005@netscape.net> <9dd082311001111056j1ca3afb4le14ba84270fb730@mail.gmail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <9dd082311001111056j1ca3afb4le14ba84270fb730@mail.gmail.com> X-Phone: +49-351-2012 669 X-PGP-Fingerprint: DC 47 E6 E4 FF A6 E9 8F 93 21 E0 7D F9 12 D6 4E X-GPG-Fingerprint: 5E84 F980 C3CA FD4B B584 1070 F48C A81B 69A8 5873 User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.20 (2009-06-14) Subject: Re: Newbie to FreeBSD on SPARC - questions about Sun hardware X-BeenThere: freebsd-sparc64@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list Reply-To: Joerg Wunsch List-Id: Porting FreeBSD to the Sparc List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2010 19:51:51 -0000 As Royce Williams wrote: > Also, "performance" means different things > to different people. I don't know of any broad, publiished benchmarks > comparing freebsd/sparc64 and freebsd/i386 performance, but they would > be interesting to see. It's been a while ago that I've really been using FreeBSD/sparc64 for the last time. However, in those situations where I've been using it, it's been on hardware that has once been used for Solaris but now became too slow/old for its original job. In all those situations, FreeBSD gave the respective machines a second life. So in general, I'd say its resource requirements are often a little lower than for a Solaris setup. But of course, your mileage may vary. If you run a fat database engine which is mostly memory-bound, both systems will probably be in the same boat. It's just that you could get a FreeBSD running with a smaller memory (and CPU) footprint than Solaris. As for the ported software, you could simply gather data by analyzing a ports tree, looking out for Makefiles that have ONLY_FOR_ARCHS or NOT_FOR_ARCHS definitions. Obvious candidates to not run on sparc64 are, of course, ports for anything that uses external binaries (Linux or Win32) that are only available for i386. I've never run a sound driver on my Sparc hardware, so I can't tell about multimedia capabilities. I guess now that many of the older Sun Blades have been retired from their first life, other people here probably made experience with running those under FreeBSD. -- cheers, J"org .-.-. --... ...-- -.. . DL8DTL http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)