Hi,

I've added port-sparc to the CC and follow ups should probably
remove port-mac68k.

> 
> william,
>  we seem like very similiar people. on another note, i am getting a sun
> sparc 5, sparc 1, and sparc 1+ for free this weekend. all religious bsd
> vs linux aside, what is the FASTEST free os for these old beasts?
> (actually i am excited about the sparc 5, it ain't that old of a beast..
> :) )

I can't comment on the 1 or 1+, but for the 5 you have two things to
consider.

- If it's a 170 you are going to have problems with Linux.  Linux
2.4 kernels seem to run fine on the 70, 85, and 110mhz MicroSparcII
chips, but the 170mhz Turbosparc gives them problems.  The symptoms
are random hangs (at least for me) under high i/o load.  The 2.6
kernels seem broken for the moment.

- NetBSD 3.0 runs execellenty on both the 110 and 170mhz ones.  I've
not tried the others.

- There was a problem with NetBSD ??, probably somewhere between
1.6 and 3, where on the MicroSparcII systems (and maybe others) you
got random segfaults/bus errors.  Probably best to not use an earlier
NetBSD than 3.0.  I think the trigger was separate data and instruction
caches which weren't the same size.  Ie, a line like:

cpu0: 16K instruction (32 b/l), 8K data (16 b/l): cache enabled


in the dmesg would be a sign not to use 2.0 or 2.1 or so.

- Finally, the slightly bad news (from the NetBSD pov).  On my 110mhz
SS4 (basically a 5 with less slots) Linux is a bit faster doing

tar cf - | (cd blah; tar xvf -)

where the source is a nfs mounted disk and the destination disk
is a fast local scsi disk.  It's 14000 files or so and 2.2gig
and NetBSD manages 0.905 meg/sec and linux (Debian 3.1) manages
1.24 meg/sec.  The network interface was a hme.

In day to day use I've not found NetBSD to be faster or slower
and have switched back to NetBSD from Linux.

I'm running NetBSD 3.0 from the install media and it's possible that a
custom build with -mcpu=v8 would help NetBSD quite a bit.

BTW, keep in mind that OpenBSD also runs on these systems
and it may be faster and/or better.  I've not tried.

cheers

bruce

-- 
edoneel@sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org