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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!msuinfo!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!usc!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!decwrl!netcomsv!dodge!not-for-mail From: daves@jan.eng.sc.rolm.com (Dave Smythe) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions Subject: Re: Need an honest opinion: Sun Sparc 5 vs. P90 or P60 NetBSD-1.0Beta Date: 24 Aug 1994 23:50:00 -0700 Organization: ROLM, A Siemens Company Lines: 37 Message-ID: <33heuo$rpg@jan.eng.sc.rolm.com> References: <33f237$19c@news.u.washington.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: jan.eng.sc.rolm.com In article <33f237$19c@news.u.washington.edu>, Mark Tamola <buckwild@u.washington.edu> wrote: >Performance and speed are big factors in my decision. Things like how much >faster does the SS5 compile something like the whole X11R5 distrib compared >to the P90, and vice versa. > >One more thing, I want to know about performance under NetBSD-1.whatever, Well, I have a Sun IPX at work and a 90MhZ Pentium at home. It's hard to compare apples to apples, though. I ran Linux and XFree86 at home for a while and it was *real* snappy. I then started playing with NetBSD-0.9. For various reasons I never got around to installing XFree under BSD (OK - it was because I kept trashing my DOS partition while re-labelling the disk, and now I need it temporarily to make some DOS-oriented money...) Anyway, the Sun console driver performance is pitiful, so that's not a fair comparison with the Pentium. As far as compilation goes, when I did a typical "config FOO;cd ../compile/FOO;make clean;make" it took about 4 1/2 minutes to complete. I expect that I am disk-bound; I have a PCI IDE drive that's about 12ms avg access time. The same is most likely true with my Sun. Its local disk is nothing special and much of the stuff I use comes via NFS. The Pentium is pretty comfortable for fiddling with the kernel. If I change a few things and recompile, it takes significantly longer to reboot the system than to build a new kernel most of the time. I'm getting another disk this weekend. Perhaps then I can get back to puttering with NetBSD. Once I get XFree86-3.1, I can try at least compiling it on both (I have a friend with a SS5). D -- Dave Smythe daves@minerva dsmythe@cs.stanford.edu dsmythe@netcom.com N6XLP "If you're haptic and you know it, clap your hands! x/~ x/~"