I may soon get the opportunity to obtain a Sun Fire T1000, which I
believe uses a T1 CPU. I think sparc64.html says that this is now
supported in 4.3-current, ie HEAD as of right now. I am highly tempted
to take up the offer of the machine, just because I've fancied playing
with something not x86/amd64 for a while. My questions are these:
Is there any way that I could put this hardware to good use for the
benefit of the project? I would ship it off to a dev, but I want to
eventually use it in production. That said, given I would like to run
OBSD on the machine when it is in production, it is in my interest to
help progress the sparc64 port until the port is sufficiently ready. It
could easily run a cron which pulled the tree to current and built the
system once a night, although that may well not be useful :-)
When I put the machine into production, I plan to use it as an AnonCVS
server for the OBSD tree, and an HTTP mirror for both OBSD and Debian,
Ubuntu, and a few other things. I believe that the nature of SMP on
these systems when using OBSD is that whilst there is multicore support,
threads of a process run on the same core. As such, for things which use
multiple processes, it will scale across the cores, whereas things which
use threads will not. Am I correct? I think this means that the anoncvs
processes will spread out among the cores, and the apache processes too,
but I may well have misunderstood.
I am essentially looking for someone to tell me I shouldn't bother
shelling out the few hundred quid I would need to expend to obtain the
machine. I'd much prefer to be told I should though :-)
Si1entDave
- Sparc64 and T1 support (also the nature of MP) Dave Wilson
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