Success / New hardware / gem or hme?

[Walter Hop]

Hi all,

this will be my last noisy post, I am mostly done now. :)

So far my experience with FreeBSD/sparc64 5.2-RC2 has been wonderful. My
congratulations and thanks to the people who have worked on the port!
Booting using the ISO and a serial terminal, installation via sysinstall,
making FreeBSD, and installing the important ports was a walk in the
park. Some more exotic ports segfault or give weird results, but that may
also be a 5.2-RC2 issue (have not compared with 5.2-RC2 i386). I also
haven't tested the gdb port yet.

I also like the Sun Netra T1 AC200 hardware. It has a very good design,
and LOM and the drive bays are excellent. Compiling on the UltraSparc
IIe/500 is slower than I had expected which is probably due to its small
cache, but disk operations are very fast. I especially appreciate the
quick reboots! I may consider buying more Sun hardware to run
FreeBSD/sparc64. I am looking for a 1U server for a database server where
disk I/O is important. Does somebody have any comments on whether the
performance of the new Sun Fire machines are worth the price?

Last question: the 2nd hand machine I bought has two on-board ethernet
ports (gem0, gem1) and a PCI card with 4 hme ports on it. Is there a
difference in quality in these adapters, or can I just pick a port at
random?

Again thanks in advance :)
walter