I miss the days when you could try 6 or 7 _fundamentally_ different computers in a computer store and pick the one you like. Now you get the choice of trying Windows machine 1, or Windows machine 2, or...
The only place I've seen a Mac on display lately is Sears.
The new Amiga could have helped the home computer stagnation a little bit, except it would have been seen only in Gateway stores and not in places like Best Buy or Sears. Still, I missed it the first time, and now I'm not going to get another chance...:~(
You can read the slides for yourself, but all that needs to be said is an estimated SPECint of 75 and a SPECfp of 120 (the best now is like, 30 and 60).
At those rates, who needs hardware acceleration for Quake?!
Do you realize how much this beast is going to cost? No doubt it will be priced well out of the reach of those who would _want_ to play Quake.
Even with all that speed, I guarantee that OpenGL performance will be lacking. Reason? No hardware accelerated OpenGL drivers for Alpha that I know of. And the glx driver for TNT/Matrox depends on x86-compatible assembly instructions, so that won't work.
Here's how much the People's Poll thinks of my opinion:
Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a004c'
Path not found
/update.inc, line 157
Re:reverse engineering linux / BSD
on
Be on the G4
·
· Score: 1
Strange... then how were NetBSD and LinuxPPC able to get specs to write their products?
I distinctly remember Apple helping the mkLinux folks out, but not sure if they helped LinuxPPC any.
I wish I knew the history of these two ports, but I think if anyone would have been sued by Apple, it would be them.
Unless, of course, Apple doesn't consider tose two projects as a threat because they aren't corporations.
I wonder what the market shares for LinuxPPC, BeOS, and NetBSD on PowerPC are. It might answer some questions regarding what Apple perceives as a threat. Then again, it might show that BeOS has a _lower_ market share than both free OSes!
Yes, the article is deceiving. lxrun does NOT require any modifications to the operating system to run Linux apps.
However, there are a couple of modifications that do need to be made to make lxrun perfect (at least on Solaris). First of all, there is a way on Unixware (lxrun's original platform) to produce the necessary ld-linux.so.1 that actually is lxrun. It's a little confusing, but that would essentially allow you to type "linuxquake3" instead of "lxrun linuxquake3" to run Q3test.
Unfortunately, the current Solaris linker doesn't have an essential option (I think it controls the relocation) to allow this to happen. I have heard that people at Sun have done this modification and gotten lxrun to work in this transparent mode. Therefore, Solaris 8 may have this option (no guarantees though).
Second, this probably affects.001% of Solaris users, but the Voodoo drivers do not currently work with lxrun. The reason is that Solaris's/dev/mem is only the size of your physical RAM, while Linux's is apparently 4GB no matter what. Since the Voodoo driver mmaps the card at whatever high RAM address the PCI/AGP bus gives it, this fails on Solaris. So no accelerated Quake 3 for Solaris (yet):(
Obviously, getting that to work would require that the/dev/mem structure in Solaris be changed. I doubt that would happen.
Also, kernel modules are out of the question... I think. Never tried modprobe or insmod. That could have some "interesting" effects though, given their close dependence on the kernel. Hopefully it just ends up with signal 11. I guess I get to test them today:-)
Oh, BTW, don't use Stampede with lxrun... for some reason pathnames don't work properly. They were fixed when I put in SuSE. Dunno if it's the glibc2.1 or the Pentium optimizations.
In other words, it's a lot less buggy than I thought;-)
Oh really. I suppose that's why the kernel has a "Support for a.out binaries" option in it.
Plus, Slackware at least has the entire a.out compatibility libraries with it. I'm sure there are others.
Frankly, I don't see why this point is relevant at all, since Solaris is ELF, the BSDs i believe are using or moving to ELF, etc...
2. No international support
And that's why X has Japanese and Cyrillic(sp? Russian) fonts. Plus you can use all those nice ISO-4digits-moredigits fonts to get all those funny little accented letters, should you need them.
Oh, wait, they meant the OS has to understand Unicode. Just more "Our way or the highway" thinking.
Actually, that would be "less" since security breaches are fixed instantly (more or less) by the sheer number of coders out there. This is in contrast to Microsoft's model where it takes forever (in Internet terms) to get a fix.
Yep, you know what come next after "They fight you..."
Don't get me wrong -- lxrun is a nice piece of software, and pretty simple in concept. Since Solaris and Linux both use the ELF executable format, each can _attempt_ to execute the binaries for the other. Unfortunately, other incompatibilities soon scuttle that.
Lxrun is basically a wrapper for executing Linux binaries. What lxrun does, first of all, is set up the search paths for loading the dynamic libraries that a Linux binary needs instead of trying to use the Solaris libraries.
However, even with the native libraries, Linux and Solaris have different sets of syscalls. The other part of lxrun's job is to intercept those syscalls and translate them to something that supposedly does the same thing in Solaris. There are still quite a few that are missing, but it seems enough of them work to get all those programs Sun has demonstrated running.
I find it interesting that they had Quake 2 running because when I tried it, the path names that it searched for its files were all wrong. The same with Quake 3 test (and now it bombs out completely because it searches for stuff in a directory with the CTRL-A character for a name!) It's possible that because I'm using Solaris 2.6 things are different then in Solaris 7, and that causes the errors.
Finally, there is at least one isssue with the OS itself (at least version 2.6) that causes problems. It seems Solaris can't access memory addresses that PCI cards get mapped to (stuff like 0xf7000000) for whatever reason. Therefore, you wouldn't be able to use VESA framebuffers or the Voodoo driver:~(
Of course, you need all the Linux libraries required for the programs yoou want to run. And given the GPL, you need to make source available for them too. What I want to know is if Sun is going to distribute the libraries with the OS, or as a separate package.
lxrun on Solaris does seem like it's been developed for Solaris 7 anyway, though. So some of these problems may be figments of my old OS.
The big problem is that a lot of stuff won't even load because Wine can't figure out how to properly relocate the program.
It's made some progress -- you can now run threaded apps (assuming they load), while a few months ago that didn't work.
Strangely enough, you're almost totally wrong because the 16-bit apps run the best!! (i.e. progman, notepad) For some reason mshearts doesn't run on my system even though everyone else developing for Solaris says it does.
Finally, yes, you CAN play minesweeper on Solaris.
You have to buy the Open Sound System if you want sound, though.
Solaris x86 workstation: $450 US Solaris X86 Server: $695 US
I believe the difference in costs is due to the different licensing for the server (i.e. you _may_ use it to serve other workstations, etc.) Not too sure as the web site says there's a single-user RTU included.
I also don't know what the 1 or 2 year subscription prices are, or if these prices include a subscription.
First of all, ENOUGH WITH THE "DEJA VU" COMMENTS! So far this discussion is content-free.
Now, I think this is a good idea for Motorola. By selling off their components division they can concentrate more on advancing things like the PowerPC and, of course, all their embedded microprocessors. This, of course, means better Macs, better cell phones, and better whatever-the-heck-else-they-use-embedded-microproc essors-for.
This may also help boost profits -- after all, how much do they really make on op-amps? It can't be all that much.
Anyway, I think it makes good business sense, sort of a trimming-the-fat move.
Re:The article brought up some interesting points
on
NOS Crossroads
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· Score: 1
First, a retraction: Solaris and Linux are only identical at high client loads; at lighter loads Solaris has an advantage. What really happens is that lighter loads Linux and NT are identical, but once the critical level is reached, Linux and Solaris are identical.
Nevertheless, I hardly think that the bad disk I/O (they also said that renaming files took _forever_ on Solaris, while other operations were extremely quick) and not-so-hot SMP would have the identical effect on the system at high loads.
The only thing that was clearly stated that was identical between the Solaris and Linux systems was the Samba Software. However, after some further reflection, I think there may indeed be a second explanation for these results.
They stated that RAID support for Linux and Solaris wasn't too great and that they had to use different servers. I think that perhaps the RAID controller used in the two boxes was limiting disk I/O speed. Of course, they conveniently forget to document the RAID controllers they actually used; even if they did it's not in an obvious place.
In other words, this test may be biased as well. Why did they not use the same RAID controller for all the OSes???? Certainly there's at least _one_ that works on them all. (most likely one of the DPT or Mylex, can't find info on Novell though)
/me shoots self for not looking at graph carefully enough.
Well, you can get it semi-playable (~3 fps give or take) by setting screen size to 320x240, all detail to the worst level (even texture detail), sky to fastest, then go to console and do
r_textureMode "GL_NEAREST"
Q3Test will then look like crap compared to its former glory, but you'll be smooth enough to rocket-jump!
;-)
Re:The article brought up some interesting points
on
NOS Crossroads
·
· Score: 1
First, a minor correction:
NetBench tests file serving to Windows clients. It has nothing to do with Apache.
Now, as both Solaris and Linux had nearly identical graphs for the NetBench part, and both were using Samba, I think we know where the bottleneck there is...
As for the WebBench test, they state that Apache becomes CPU-bound at 24 clients because it spawns a new process for each client.
They also provide a neat explanation for the Mindcraft report's incredible decaying performance with higher user load. That was caused by the processes spawned on startup. They fixed it by editing a parameter in the configuration file, though they don't specify which one.
Unfortunately, they attribute the slow Samba performance to not having the file serving code in the kernel, which doesn't help us at all.
On a side note: The mention that Linux could probably be ported to a solar calculator. Any takers?
Slashdot Mirror
Since that one Star Wars personality test said I had about as much kindness as Emperor Palpatine, I figure I might as well apply!
I miss the days when you could try 6 or 7 _fundamentally_ different computers in a computer store and pick the one you like. Now you get the choice of trying Windows machine 1, or Windows machine 2, or...
:~(
The only place I've seen a Mac on display lately is Sears.
The new Amiga could have helped the home computer stagnation a little bit, except it would have been seen only in Gateway stores and not in places like Best Buy or Sears. Still, I missed it the first time, and now I'm not going to get another chance...
If you bothered to read the article, you would have seen the bit about the 58-atom motor that runs on light -- and actually works!
:-)
It's made by the Dutch and Japanese, though. Read whatever you want into that
when you can have a whole room?!
THAT seems just like the Holodeck to me, except it's too small (1-5 people?)
Now if only I had $50 million dollars...
Solaris/x86 supports 4GB in versions 2.6 and (2.)7. 2.5 only supports 2GB. Having more hangs the system :-(
I had read that recent revisions of 7 would support 36 GB on P6 machines; however I guess that functionality was removed.
The link, please? I can't find it anyware at Ace's Hardware.
Check out the Alpha site.
You can read the slides for yourself, but all that needs to be said is an estimated SPECint of 75 and a SPECfp of 120 (the best now is like, 30 and 60).
At those rates, who needs hardware acceleration for Quake?!
It's not free in the way the Open-Source crowd would like it to be. It's not "free-speech" free, only "free-beer" free.
It is a big deal, as this is not acceptable to the true Open Source warrior.
My personal views differ somewhat, however, as I'm primarily "Anything But Microsoft".
Do you realize how much this beast is going to cost? No doubt it will be priced well out of the reach of those who would _want_ to play Quake.
Even with all that speed, I guarantee that OpenGL performance will be lacking. Reason? No hardware accelerated OpenGL drivers for Alpha that I know of. And the glx driver for TNT/Matrox depends on x86-compatible assembly instructions, so that won't work.
Here's how much the People's Poll thinks of my opinion:
Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a004c'
Path not found
/update.inc, line 157
Strange... then how were NetBSD and LinuxPPC able to get specs to write their products?
I distinctly remember Apple helping the mkLinux folks out, but not sure if they helped LinuxPPC any.
I wish I knew the history of these two ports, but I think if anyone would have been sued by Apple, it would be them.
Unless, of course, Apple doesn't consider tose two projects as a threat because they aren't corporations.
I wonder what the market shares for LinuxPPC, BeOS, and NetBSD on PowerPC are. It might answer some questions regarding what Apple perceives as a threat. Then again, it might show that BeOS has a _lower_ market share than both free OSes!
Answer: NO.
IIRC, many dial-up accounts have dynamic IP allocation. That would just be unfair.
I guess the money does matter to him after all. Given that Steve Ball was one of his students, though, that explains a lot.
Is the power of Microsoft indeed, as it indeed seems to be, infinite?
If Einstruzende Neubauten or Orbital go that route, though... *shudder*
Yes, the article is deceiving. lxrun does NOT require any modifications to the operating system to run Linux apps.
.001% of Solaris users, but the Voodoo drivers do not currently work with lxrun. The reason is that Solaris's /dev/mem is only the size of your physical RAM, while Linux's is apparently 4GB no matter what. Since the Voodoo driver mmaps the card at whatever high RAM address the PCI/AGP bus gives it, this fails on Solaris. So no accelerated Quake 3 for Solaris (yet) :(
/dev/mem structure in Solaris be changed. I doubt that would happen.
:-)
;-)
However, there are a couple of modifications that do need to be made to make lxrun perfect (at least on Solaris). First of all, there is a way on Unixware (lxrun's original platform) to produce the necessary ld-linux.so.1 that actually is lxrun. It's a little confusing, but that would essentially allow you to type "linuxquake3" instead of "lxrun linuxquake3" to run Q3test.
Unfortunately, the current Solaris linker doesn't have an essential option (I think it controls the relocation) to allow this to happen. I have heard that people at Sun have done this modification and gotten lxrun to work in this transparent mode. Therefore, Solaris 8 may have this option (no guarantees though).
Second, this probably affects
Obviously, getting that to work would require that the
Also, kernel modules are out of the question... I think. Never tried modprobe or insmod. That could have some "interesting" effects though, given their close dependence on the kernel. Hopefully it just ends up with signal 11. I guess I get to test them today
Oh, BTW, don't use Stampede with lxrun... for some reason pathnames don't work properly. They were fixed when I put in SuSE. Dunno if it's the glibc2.1 or the Pentium optimizations.
In other words, it's a lot less buggy than I thought
moviefone.com runs Apache 1.3.6. on Solaris.
You would think they would be running Zeus, though...
Now how about explaining why they're all false?
1. NO back compatibility for a.out binaries
Oh really. I suppose that's why the kernel has a "Support for a.out binaries" option in it.
Plus, Slackware at least has the entire a.out compatibility libraries with it. I'm sure there are others.
Frankly, I don't see why this point is relevant at all, since Solaris is ELF, the BSDs i believe are using or moving to ELF, etc...
2. No international support
And that's why X has Japanese and Cyrillic(sp? Russian) fonts. Plus you can use all those nice ISO-4digits-moredigits fonts to get all those funny little accented letters, should you need them.
Oh, wait, they meant the OS has to understand Unicode. Just more "Our way or the highway" thinking.
3. Poor support for Java
http://www.blackdown.org. Nuff said, except Sun themselves have endorsed them.
4. MORE PRONE TO SECURITY BREACHES
Actually, that would be "less" since security breaches are fixed instantly (more or less) by the sheer number of coders out there. This is in contrast to Microsoft's model where it takes forever (in Internet terms) to get a fix.
Yep, you know what come next after "They fight you..."
Solaris is now a System V Release 4 derivative. Solaris 1 AKA SunOS 4 was BSD based.
Solaris still does have a BSD compatibility package though.
Don't get me wrong -- lxrun is a nice piece of software, and pretty simple in concept. Since Solaris and Linux both use the ELF executable format, each can _attempt_ to execute the binaries for the other. Unfortunately, other incompatibilities soon scuttle that.
:~(
Lxrun is basically a wrapper for executing Linux binaries. What lxrun does, first of all, is set up the search paths for loading the dynamic libraries that a Linux binary needs instead of trying to use the Solaris libraries.
However, even with the native libraries, Linux and Solaris have different sets of syscalls. The other part of lxrun's job is to intercept those syscalls and translate them to something that supposedly does the same thing in Solaris. There are still quite a few that are missing, but it seems enough of them work to get all those programs Sun has demonstrated running.
I find it interesting that they had Quake 2 running because when I tried it, the path names that it searched for its files were all wrong. The same with Quake 3 test (and now it bombs out completely because it searches for stuff in a directory with the CTRL-A character for a name!) It's possible that because I'm using Solaris 2.6 things are different then in Solaris 7, and that causes the errors.
Finally, there is at least one isssue with the OS itself (at least version 2.6) that causes problems. It seems Solaris can't access memory addresses that PCI cards get mapped to (stuff like 0xf7000000) for whatever reason. Therefore, you wouldn't be able to use VESA framebuffers or the Voodoo driver
Of course, you need all the Linux libraries required for the programs yoou want to run. And given the GPL, you need to make source available for them too. What I want to know is if Sun is going to distribute the libraries with the OS, or as a separate package.
lxrun on Solaris does seem like it's been developed for Solaris 7 anyway, though. So some of these problems may be figments of my old OS.
Wine works, but just barely.
The big problem is that a lot of stuff won't even load because Wine can't figure out how to properly relocate the program.
It's made some progress -- you can now run threaded apps (assuming they load), while a few months ago that didn't work.
Strangely enough, you're almost totally wrong because the 16-bit apps run the best!! (i.e. progman, notepad) For some reason mshearts doesn't run on my system even though everyone else developing for Solaris says it does.
Finally, yes, you CAN play minesweeper on Solaris.
You have to buy the Open Sound System if you want sound, though.
Solaris x86 workstation: $450 US
Solaris X86 Server: $695 US
I believe the difference in costs is due to the different licensing for the server (i.e. you _may_ use it to serve other workstations, etc.) Not too sure as the web site says there's a single-user RTU included.
I also don't know what the 1 or 2 year subscription prices are, or if these prices include a subscription.
www.intel.com runs Microsoft-IIS/4.0 according to Netcraft.
(insert smart-ass comment here)
First of all, ENOUGH WITH THE "DEJA VU" COMMENTS! So far this discussion is content-free.
c essors-for.
Now, I think this is a good idea for Motorola. By selling off their components division they can concentrate more on advancing things like the PowerPC and, of course, all their embedded microprocessors. This, of course, means better Macs, better cell phones, and better whatever-the-heck-else-they-use-embedded-micropro
This may also help boost profits -- after all, how much do they really make on op-amps? It can't be all that much.
Anyway, I think it makes good business sense, sort of a trimming-the-fat move.
First, a retraction: Solaris and Linux are only identical at high client loads; at lighter loads Solaris has an advantage. What really happens is that lighter loads Linux and NT are identical, but once the critical level is reached, Linux and Solaris are identical.
Nevertheless, I hardly think that the bad disk I/O (they also said that renaming files took _forever_ on Solaris, while other operations were extremely quick) and not-so-hot SMP would have the identical effect on the system at high loads.
The only thing that was clearly stated that was identical between the Solaris and Linux systems was the Samba Software. However, after some further reflection, I think there may indeed be a second explanation for these results.
They stated that RAID support for Linux and Solaris wasn't too great and that they had to use different servers. I think that perhaps the RAID controller used in the two boxes was limiting disk I/O speed. Of course, they conveniently forget to document the RAID controllers they actually used; even if they did it's not in an obvious place.
In other words, this test may be biased as well. Why did they not use the same RAID controller for all the OSes???? Certainly there's at least _one_ that works on them all. (most likely one of the DPT or Mylex, can't find info on Novell though)
/me shoots self for not looking at graph carefully enough.
Well, you can get it semi-playable (~3 fps give or take) by setting screen size to 320x240, all detail to the worst level (even texture detail), sky to fastest, then go to console and do
r_textureMode "GL_NEAREST"
Q3Test will then look like crap compared to its former glory, but you'll be smooth enough to rocket-jump!
;-)
First, a minor correction:
NetBench tests file serving to Windows clients. It has nothing to do with Apache.
Now, as both Solaris and Linux had nearly identical graphs for the NetBench part, and both were using Samba, I think we know where the bottleneck there is...
As for the WebBench test, they state that Apache becomes CPU-bound at 24 clients because it spawns a new process for each client.
They also provide a neat explanation for the Mindcraft report's incredible decaying performance with higher user load. That was caused by the processes spawned on startup. They fixed it by editing a parameter in the configuration file, though they don't specify which one.
Unfortunately, they attribute the slow Samba performance to not having the file serving code in the kernel, which doesn't help us at all.
On a side note: The mention that Linux could probably be ported to a solar calculator. Any takers?