Date: Tue, 25 Aug 1998 10:25:05 -0400 From: "Gary Palmer" <gpalmer@FreeBSD.ORG> To: Paul Richards <paul@originative.co.uk> Cc: "'Philippe Regnauld'" <regnauld@deepo.prosa.dk>, Chuck Robey <chuckr@Glue.umd.edu>, freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Threads across processors Message-ID: <8887.904055105@gjp.erols.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 25 Aug 1998 14:20:31 BST." <E40CBF0361C7D111914000C0F0303D1086D3@OCTOPUS>
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Paul Richards wrote in message ID <E40CBF0361C7D111914000C0F0303D1086D3@OCTOPUS>: > > -----Original Message----- > > From: Philippe Regnauld [mailto:regnauld@deepo.prosa.dk] > > Sent: Tuesday, August 25, 1998 11:02 AM > > To: Paul Richards > > Cc: 'Gary Palmer'; Chuck Robey; freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG > > Subject: Re: Threads across processors > > > > > > Paul Richards writes: > > > Hotmail are apparently dropping FreeBSD in favour of > > Solaris because of > > > thread support as well :-( > > > > Hotmail is Micro$loth now. If they'd had half a brain, they'd > > do like Yahoo and sponsor development of the ugly work... > > > > Maybe someone should suggest it to them. It must be costing a fair bit > to switch to Solaris. They must have some independence from Microsoft to > be able to go for Solaris, although it is due to the fact that NT fell > on it's face when faced with the task :-) I'll be brutally honest at this point. There are probably two reasons to go with UltraSPARCs and Solaris. 1) Solaris is heavily threaded, and some of the designs in the kernel are actually pretty neat. 2) The PC hardware platform *BLOWS*. Looking at work at the sort of hardware we can deploy with a UE250 or UE450 makes every PC I've ever seen pale in comparison. This is not counting the E4000 series machines we have which, when combined with Solaris, are pretty nice. e.g. in 2.7, you can hot remove and insert any board in a E4000, including processor and I/O boards. And if we have any problems, our support contract will get us a spare part, and an engineer to install it for us, within 2 hours. Now, I still hate solaris. But its pretty difficult to persuade someone to stay with a PC platform which he has to support himself/herself, when (now) the company I work for has the money to let them go out and buy UltraSPARC equipment and push all that responsibility onto SMI. So I think that it is important that effort be dedicated to the UltraSPARC port and also the Alpha port (which I am helping with when I can). Or perhaps some other comodity hardware that is not as braindamaged as the PC. Gary -- Gary Palmer FreeBSD Core Team Member FreeBSD: Turning PC's into workstations. See http://www.FreeBSD.ORG/ for info To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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