Post 1.2 development

Post 1.2 development

[David Van Beveren]

While waiting eagerly for the 1.2 release, I have a few questions about
future development:

1. What can we expect in the way of a time frame for a peek at 64-bit
userland? Are we talking about 1-2 months, 6 months or a year? This is a
really critical piece of information for ISVs contemplating porting to
UltraPenguin.

2. What is the outlook for Solaris emulation? Will this always require
Solaris shared libs, and a corresponding Solaris license?

3. Has anyone considered tackling the Sun PCi card, the one with the AMD
CPU onboard, and scoping out the task of running Win95 on this card
under Linux, like Sun does under Solaris?

Thanks in advance for any insight.

David

Re: Post 1.2 development

[David Miller]

   Date: 	Sat, 27 Mar 1999 16:22:09 -0800
   From: David Van Beveren <dvb@eis.com>

   1. What can we expect in the way of a time frame for a peek at
   64-bit userland? Are we talking about 1-2 months, 6 months or a
   year? This is a really critical piece of information for ISVs
   contemplating porting to UltraPenguin.

I believe I told you in private email a few weeks ago that we are
currently shooting for some time near mid-summer.  But as usual, no
promises.

That being said, I believe people who are porting applications which
have no real need for 64-bits are making a mistake by making a 64-bit
sparc version of their application.  This is simply because if they
make a 32-bit version then the whole sparc line of systems can run
that application.

The 64-bit userland will be slightly slower for most applications, and
this is just a fact of life not anything to do with how our
implementation will work (pointers and types are bigger, thus the
memory references of the application, even for common tasks, will be
larger).

   2. What is the outlook for Solaris emulation? Will this always
   require Solaris shared libs, and a corresponding Solaris license?

We have no incentive to work very hard on this, sorry.  I really don't
want Linux to become a "emulation system" anyways.

   3. Has anyone considered tackling the Sun PCi card, the one with
   the AMD CPU onboard, and scoping out the task of running Win95 on
   this card under Linux, like Sun does under Solaris?

No hardware docs, no access to cards, no chance at support.

Actually what would be even more interesting about this piece of
hardware would be running Intel Linux binaries on it so one could run
x86 Linux applications on such a machine.

Later,
David S. Miller
davem@redhat.com

Re: Post 1.2 development

[pau]

On Sat, 27 Mar 1999, David Miller wrote:

>    1. What can we expect in the way of a time frame for a peek at
>    64-bit userland? Are we talking about 1-2 months, 6 months or a
>    year? This is a really critical piece of information for ISVs
>    contemplating porting to UltraPenguin.
> 
> I believe I told you in private email a few weeks ago that we are
> currently shooting for some time near mid-summer.  But as usual, no
> promises.
> 
> That being said, I believe people who are porting applications which
> have no real need for 64-bits are making a mistake by making a 64-bit
> sparc version of their application.  This is simply because if they
> make a 32-bit version then the whole sparc line of systems can run
> that application.
> 
> The 64-bit userland will be slightly slower for most applications, and
> this is just a fact of life not anything to do with how our
> implementation will work (pointers and types are bigger, thus the
> memory references of the application, even for common tasks, will be
> larger).

Then, will we be able to support more than 2^16 users per machine,
i.e. 2^32?

Pau

Re: Post 1.2 development

[pau]

On Mon, 29 Mar 1999, Jakub Jelinek wrote:

> > Then, will we be able to support more than 2^16 users per machine,
> > i.e. 2^32?
> 
> Yes, uid_t/gid_t are 32bit on sparc64.

Are the user programs and libraries ready? In which distribution?
I'm trying Ultralinux 1.9 -waiting for 1.2 o Redhat 6.0-.

Thx
Pau

Re: Post 1.2 development

[Jakub Jelinek]

> Then, will we be able to support more than 2^16 users per machine,
> i.e. 2^32?

Yes, uid_t/gid_t are 32bit on sparc64.

Cheers,
    Jakub
___________________________________________________________________
Jakub Jelinek | jj@sunsite.mff.cuni.cz | http://sunsite.mff.cuni.cz
Administrator of SunSITE Czech Republic, MFF, Charles University
___________________________________________________________________
UltraLinux  |  http://ultra.linux.cz/  |  http://ultra.penguin.cz/
Linux version 2.2.4 on a sparc64 machine (3958.37 BogoMips)
___________________________________________________________________

Re: Post 1.2 development

[David Miller]

   Date: 	Mon, 29 Mar 1999 11:29:36 +0200 (CEST)
   From: <pau@readysoft.es>

   On Mon, 29 Mar 1999, Jakub Jelinek wrote:

   > Yes, uid_t/gid_t are 32bit on sparc64.

   Are the user programs and libraries ready? In which distribution?
   I'm trying Ultralinux 1.9 -waiting for 1.2 o Redhat 6.0-.

Please follow the thread, there is nothing ready yet.

Later,
David S. Miller
davem@redhat.com

Re: Post 1.2 development

[Scott Michel]

>    2. What is the outlook for Solaris emulation? Will this always
>    require Solaris shared libs, and a corresponding Solaris license?

I'm currently struggling with the current Solaris emulation and
I'm compiling some notes. However, I'm not sure whether I can
easily make them available via the Web at present.

So far, most everything, barring X applications, appear to work
with the usual caveats (at least the Solaris 2.5[.1], 2.6 binaries.)
X looks like a bigger challenge and I hope to have some notes or
solutions in a couple of weeks.


-scooter
--
Scott Michel
Computer Systems Research Department                scottm@aero.org
The Aerospace Corporation                           +1-310-336-5034