A Look at Solaris 10 and Sun's Dual Core Fire V40z
by Kristopher Kubicki on June 29, 2005 4:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Systems
But.... (Solaris 10 Cont.)
Unfortunately, not all was entirely well in Solaris-land. Even though we had a final build of Solaris 10, there were a lot of things broken or "misplaced" from time to time. OpenSSL would segfault out of the box when running the "speed" benchmark, for example. Also, Solaris 10 fragments the user land into several directories based on the nature of the software. For example GNU software is located in /usr/sfw. This non-traditional pathing seems to play havoc on programs that want to be placed in /usr/ and /usr/local.
There were other small dissapointments like the fragmented userland. ZFS, Sun's successor to UFS, is not present in Solaris 10 yet. ZFS will be capable of 128-bit data storage and complete disk virtualization while being completely endian neutral (i.e., you can take ZFS discs from a SPARC or RISC machine and use them in an x86 machine). Unfortunately ZFS missed the ship date of Solaris 10 and it doesn't look like we will see it for a few months still.
We could write another page just about the driver support, but we are somewhat mixed on this issue. Fortunately all of the devices on our V40z are fully supported with drivers that (at least on the surface) appear to be functioning flawlessly. When we took Solaris 10 for a test spin on some off the shelf hardware, things were really hit or miss. There was a deep lack of support for our RAID controllers, something we would expect a server-oriented operating system to focus more on.
Some of the other rough edges include a security advisory that just came out a few days ago concerning Solaris 10's ld.so. It's not to say that Linux or FreeBSD don't have these problems either, but Solaris 10 definitely has the feeling of "unpolished". Zones and DTrace are excellent features but at times they can be a bit overwhelming. With continually better interfaces and maturity, we feel pretty confident the Solaris 10 operating system as a whole will have a pretty strong future as a competitive server OS.
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nottlv - Tuesday, July 5, 2005 - link
#46; the 8 way record claim was for a 64-bit JVM. The PowerPC result you reference was for a 32-bit JVM. specjbb stresses the memory architecture heavily (there's no I/O); the submitted result from IBM include a machine with 64GB of RAM, while the Sun Opteron box had 16GB, and they are running different JVM versions. If you look at the lower numbered runs you'll notice they're pretty close (the Opteron being slightly ahead), but that it hits it's wall much earlier due to significantly less RAM.jjames5 - Tuesday, July 5, 2005 - link
8 way jbb2000 world record - right!This result is a year old and still bests the sun with over 50%:
http://www.spec.org/jbb2000/results/res2004q3/jbb2...
nserra - Friday, July 1, 2005 - link
#34 That is plain stupid, it isnt from been taken out that it will protect him (if thats the true), or the microsoft guys cant read forums where the article have been already posted.Microsoft only have to look for who usually talk with anand.
Opteron - Friday, July 1, 2005 - link
Forget my last comment...ps. i missed 4 way Xeon and Itanium systems :D
Opteron - Friday, July 1, 2005 - link
There is miscalculations about percentages, those are calculated wrong.In http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/sun%20fire%20v4...
comment is:
" We see a 43% performance increase over the quad Opteron 250 V40z; certainly impressive but we would like to see more."
But actually it's almost 64% since there is no point in comparing 5 threads vs 5 in a 8core system..
Googer - Friday, July 1, 2005 - link
Where did the article go?KristopherKubicki - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
Den: Very true but recall that our previous test was done on Opteron 850s instead of Opteron 852s. The 852 performs a bit better than th 850.opus13i: We have been stuckin MI redtape land for some time. It wouldn't make sense to change the benchmark at this point either because our previous tests used the 32-bit single core solution. Since they don't seem to have much desire to provide us with the correct license we will probably drop that benchmark in favor of something a little more versatile.
Kristopher
Kristopher
jkostans - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
I dont care who made the hardware, its a hell of a machine. I wish Intel had to rely on inovation and good products to survive like AMD does. Intel really doesn't have many products capable of out performing AMDs equivalent anymore.opus13i - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
ugh.Did you even bother to check with mental images? With a simple phone call you could have had the proper licensing in place for 8 cores, as well as every possible variation of 64bit possible.
"We include Mental Ray and Shake as a point of reference, although both applications are strictly 32-bit at this time. Mental Ray is further hindered by the fact that the version we have is not SMP-aware."
way to go detective, i dont suppose you actually looked at teh specifications did you?
http://www.mentalimages.com/2_1_2_configurations/i...
no 64 bit indeed.
Xunilla - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
You folks are giving Sun a bit too much credit on the hardware portion of this review. In reality, the system OEM is a company called Newisys, a subsidiary of Sanmina-SCI.