Newbie to FreeBSD on SPARC - questions about Sun hardware

[Eirik Øverby]

On 11. jan. 2010, at 20.35, Kaya Saman wrote:

> Royce Williams wrote:
>> On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 9:30 AM, Kaya Saman <SamanKaya at netscape.net> wrote:
>> 
>>  
>>> is this list online or dead?
>>> 
>>> Sorry am just not used to a mailing list being this quiet! Usually within a
>>> few minutes or hours of signing up someone has posted something to the list
>>> (not meaning response to what I ask but just in a generic sense).
>>>    
>> 
>> I'm mostly a lurker on this list, but I'd say that the silence was
>> because your message had multiple sections, and some of the questions
>> were non-trivial to answer. :-)
>> 
>> Your summary was helpful:
>> 
>> [...]
>> 
>> .. but you also said that you were interested in the difference
>> between SPARC and x86. There are many, many variables underneath the
>> answer to these questions.  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.
>> 
>> Maybe someone else on the list is in a similar boat, and will chime in
>> here. :-)  In my experience, unless you can find others who are
>> already working under similar requirements, the clueful advice I've
>> seen people give is that doing your own testing is the best way to get
>> results that are meaningful to your situation.
>> 
>> Royce
>> _______________________________________________
>> freebsd-sparc64 at freebsd.org mailing list
>> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-sparc64
>> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-sparc64-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
>>  
> Many thanks for the response Royce! :-)
> 
> Actually I am not that much interested in the performance benefits between x86 and SPARC; but more between OpenSolaris and FreeBSD on SPARC as I will be running either one on a Sun V480 server.
> 
> The issue I am facing is purely down to software and administration. I mean the best example I can provide is that BSD has the packages I want at least for x86 which I've seen: that are Cacti, Munin, and awstats (should also be there for SPARC too) but then Solaris has zones which allow me to allocate a separate virtualized OS contained within the master OS or global zone. BSD on the other hand has jails and as from going onto the jails list apparently I can actually assign interfaces to various jails which is what I was going to do if I used Solaris Zones.
> 
> So that's really what my issue is: which OS to choose??
> 
> Adding to what I mentioned about Cacti, Munin etc.... Solaris has a secondary site called opencsw which you can download most of the stuff bar Cacti. This just makes thing tricky I feel to install and configure since one can do a /usr/ports/*/cacti then make install clean which will do everything on FreeBSD.

Two things that make me use FreeBSD before (Open)Solaris on any piece of SPARC hardware I get my hands on:
 - It "feels" faster, snappier, whatever, no hard evidence, just gut feeling
 - FreeBSD is, from my perspective and when using non-bundled opensource software, easier to manage. Three words: ports, portmaster, freebsd-update.

/Eirik


> Hmm..... decisions, decisions......
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Kaya
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-sparc64 at freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-sparc64
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-sparc64-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
>