Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!batcomputer!itsgw!steinmetz!crdgw1!uunet!auspex!guy
From: guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Criteria for comparing RISC processors
Message-ID: <1574@auspex.auspex.com>
Date: 6 May 89 06:38:34 GMT
References: <2368@ogccse.ogc.edu> <1464@cfa.cfa.harvard.EDU> <141@dg.dg.com> <156@dg.dg.com> <658@pitstop.West.Sun.COM> <165@dg.dg.com>
Reply-To: guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris)
Organization: Auspex Systems, Santa Clara
Lines: 20

>  Sun networks ALREADY have a massive problem with Sun/3 and Sun/4
>binaries required for everything you use.  Neither MIPS nor the 88K
>have this problem.

Which problem is that?  SPARC, MIPS, and the 88K *all* have the problem
that they don't run 68K binaries without some object-to-object compiler
or interpreter, if that's the "massive problem with Sun/3 and Sun/4
binaries" to which you're referring.  They probably all have the same
problem of sharing with binary data files, unless they took the approach
of having their compilers do 68K-style structure alignments (as I
remember hearing Apollo's PRISM compiler does by default).  Those are
the only two "massive problem(s) with Sun/3 and Sun/4 binaries" I can
think of....

All SPARC-based machines out now can run one another's user-mode
binaries (as long as they don't do things like depend on fine details of
address space layout, or assume some specific page size, or depend on
kernel data structures, or depend on particular devices being present,
or...  you get the picture; these are, by and large, potentially
problems for *any* chip).  I presume this will continue to be true.