Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!ll-xn!mit-eddie!bbn!diamond.bbn.com!mlandau From: mlandau@bbn.com (Matt Landau) Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions Subject: Re: wanted: Sun 386 Workstation (Road Runner) info Message-ID: <10928@jade.BBN.COM> Date: 3 May 88 13:19:08 GMT References: <148@gsg.UUCP> Reply-To: mlandau@bbn.com (Matt Landau) Organization: BBN Laboratories Incorporated, Cambridge, MA Lines: 132 Keywords: sun 386 Roadrunner Summary: information from someone who's had a beta machine (long) In comp.unix.questions (<148@gsg.UUCP>), lew@gsg.UUCP (Paul Lew) writes: >I would like to find out more information about Road Runner from its user. >Is it a stable machine to buy? How about performance compare to other >product? Do the 16-bits bus slow it down at all? Please give your opioion >only if you actually use it. Well, now that the machine is announced, I guess it's okay to talk about it. I've been dealing with Roadrunners for about the past 2 months, first in a Sun porting lab (we demo'd some software at the big rollout in Boston) and subsequently on our own beta machine. My experience has been that the machine is an abolsute JOY to work with, notwithstanding a few bugs in the beta test hardware and software. I don't know much about performance of the DOS emulation (though I've seen it run Flight Simulator, Lotus, and Microsoft Windows(!) in its own DOS windows under SunView, all concurrently) or AT peripherals plugged into the bus. We'll be doing some work in those areas, but haven't quite gotten there yet. What I like about the Roadrunner: - The machine is FAST! Our 386i/250 (8 megs memory) really does deliver about 4 to 5 VAX MIPS in day-to-day use, for raw CPU horsepower. Even coupled with the relatively slow SCSI disk it beats our Eagle-equipped 3/160 servers by a factor of 2 for compilations, etc. - SunOS 4.0 seems quite stable, even in beta test. There are many nice things in SunOS 4 -- shared libraries, the NFS automounter (file systems can now be made mount on reference), etc. - There are many nice Roadrunner-specific additions to SunOS, including volumes (symbolic names mapped to machine:filesystem pairs -- cd to /vol/{symbolic-name} and the appropriate filesystem is automatically mounted), automatic system installation (only really useful on a network of Roadrunners at the moment, but give them time), the interactive help system (must be seen in action), and all of the so-called "EZ Unix" stuff to make the machine a little easier to run without a full time wizard at your disposal. - The SunView user interface for SunOS 4.0 has been made cleaner, and many of the tools (textedit, mailtool, etc) seem to be much improved. - It's almost completely compatible with the Sun 3 line, but faster than most of them. I ported 130K lines of code in under a week, the only change being 10 lines of extra code on the Roadrunner [because I was creating my own in-memory pixrect structures without going through libpixrect.a, and there were some extra tweaks needed on the Roadrunner; if you use the library interfaces, you'll never know the difference.] I should point out that this code was already VERY careful about not assuming big-endianism internally. - The Organizer is a decent interface to the filesystem, running (excuse me, "launching") applications by double clicking on them, etc. for those who want the Mac Finder on a Sun. - Modulo the bugs mentioned below, the DOS emulation stuff seems to be a very nice job. In particular, they pay attention to things like emulating the PC's physical disk (on a dedicated chunk of disk in $HOME/PC) so that copy-protected software can be installed, emulating a couple of different displays, trying to let you control access to the floppy drive when you have multiple DOS windows running, etc. What I don't like about the Roadrunner: - AT peripherals that do DMA are not working in the beta release of the system. Sun has promised that this will be fixed by first customer ship. - Only relatively low interrupt rates can be sustained on the AT bus. This is also supposed to be a beta test problem. - You cannot debug binaries linked with shared libraries, due to some internal implementation problems in dbx [like, it tries to set a breakpoint on _exit when it starts up, but _exit might not be present until libc is dynamically linked in at runtime]. Sun is apparently working hard on this one, but in the meantime you have to specify static linking if you want to use dbx on the resulting binaries. - The COFF object file format only allows 64K line number records to be embedded in a binary, making debugging big programs a pain. I talked to one of the compiler people at Sun about this once -- it's a recognized problem, and there are known ways to fix the compilers and debuggers, so I'd expect this limitation to go away later. - The automatic installation and EZ Unix stuff are still a little shaky in beta test. In particular, there's not enough attention (in my opinion) paid to 386i's that have to coexist on existing YP networks with Sun 3's, and to machines that live on the Internet. I can understand this, since Sun is trying to sell Roadrunners into a different market segment, but the fact remains that if you want to hook a Roadrunner up into an existing network, you may need a decent system administrator to get things configured correctly. On the other hand, if you have an existing network of Suns, you probably already HAVE a decent system administrator. - I'm not terribly crazy about the new filesystem layout in SunOS 4.0, especially in view of the fact that Sun, DEC, and UCB all seem to be redoing the filesystem layout, and all in different ways. This is a pain for those of us who have to manage multiple machine/OS types. What do I really think about the Sun 386i? I like it. A lot. It's about the only machine I can imagine wanting to buy for my home. If I were still doing consulting, I could easily recommend it to lots of people. It would be a really nice software development environment, for other Suns or for PC's. [The company I used to work for did PC development by using a VAX- or Pyramid-based cross-compiler. It would have been nice to be able to use a Sun-based cross-compliler and test/debug the software right in another window.] It would be a nice financial analyst's machine, especially for those people who have a while pile of PC software and data that they don't want to throw away, but who have outgrown PC's and want to get into the world of real computers. :-) And of course it's a Sun, so it's nice for DTP, CAD, and all those other uninteresting things that non-hackers do with their Suns now :-) [DISCLAIMER: I don't work for Sun. I just like the machine a lot. I *think* everything I've said above is correct, but I've been dealing with beta test hardware and software, and conditions may have changed. These are all my own opinions, and BBN has nothing to do with them.] -- Matt Landau Let not a man glory in this: that he loves his country. mlandau@bbn.com Let him glory rather in this: that he loves his kind.