NEW BRUNSWICK, PRAGUE. Jul, 12th, 1997. The UltraLinux team proudly announces UltraPenguin 1.0, first publicly available distribution of Linux for UltraSPARC I and II processor based workstations. Some lower end EnterPrise server machines are supported as well in uni-processor mode. See below.
This distribution is based on Red Hat Linux, version 4.2 for sparc.
DISCLAIMER: Although this is based upon a RedHat Linux release, RedHat does not support this. They will not provide support for the UltraPenguin-1.0 distribution. It is our hack which we put together so that people can be provided with a full UltraLinux system early. Please do not bother RedHat about problems you encounter with this release, thank you.
UltraLinux is a fast 64bit free operating system, which supports up to 1TB of physical and another 1TB of IO memory, fully supports Linux/Sparc 32bit binaries plus will soon support 64bit UltraLinux ELF binaries. It uses the Visual Instruction Set for high bandwidth operations, even older 32-bit applications take advantage of this increased performance if they are dynamically linked. The 64-bit userland for UltraPenguin is half done, developers have initial statically linked ELF 64-bit binaries working. We will announce seperately the availability of this so others can experiment with it and help us out, so please be patient.
ULTRAPENGUIN 1.0 distribution is available at least from the
following sites:
Ultra 2 low end servers are supported in uni-processor mode. For example,
Ultra EnterPrise 1 and Ultra EnterPrise 2 servers can be expected to
work. Higher end EnterPrise server machines such as the 3000, 4000,
5000, 6000, and 10000, all of which use the Gigaplane bus, are not
supported yet.
If you are interested in seeing UltraPenguin supported on the higher
end server machines, you are encouraged to make an effort to help
Jakub or David obtain such a system so that the support can be written.
(David leaves for SGI in mid September, and thus will no be able to
contribute as heavily, if at all, on the necessary work, so if you
can assist with this, do it soon!)
We realize that many will want to install and use UltraPenguin via
a serial console. RedHat fully supports this in their installation
mechanism, *however* we have been so busy working on getting UltraPenguin
to a releasable state that we have not had time to test and fix any
problems with serial console in the kernel. In fact we have not even
tried to use it for some time. Please be patient, and we will work on
making it work and giving it a good testing. Such updates will be
announced here and on the usual Linux/Sparc mailing lists, so it will
be hard to miss when it happens. 8-)
At least the networking bandwidths will increase, as soon as we fix bugs in
the high bandwidth checksumming routines we already wrote. Also, numerous
optimization improvements we are writing for GCC on the Ultra will make
things even faster. Hey, we just got it working, wait until we really
put time into performance! 8-)
What UltraSparc machines are currently supported?
which have a TurboGX (cgsix) framebuffer. Creator and
Creator3D machines are not yet supported, unless you put
a supported framebuffer into one of the sbus slots. Creator support
is now actively being developed.
You might want to ask why do I need Linux on my Ultra? - here is a
couple of reasons why you shouldn't miss this:
How fast is it?
L M B E N C H 1 . 1 S U M M A R Y
------------------------------------
Processor, Processes - times in microseconds
--------------------------------------------
Host OS Mhz Null Null Simple /bin/sh Mmap 2-proc 8-proc
Syscall Process Process Process lat ctxsw ctxsw
--------- ------------- ---- ------- ------- ------- ------- ---- ------ ------
manka Linux 2.1.44 167 3 1K 7K 19K 36 6 8
jenolan SunOS 5.5.1 167 6 4K 21K 38K 405 15 20
tanya Linux 2.1.44 200 3 0K 11K 26K 34 5 8
ccpenguin Linux 2.1.44 144 4 1K 16K 39K 72 7 10
*Local* Communication latencies in microseconds
-----------------------------------------------
Host OS Pipe UDP RPC/ TCP RPC/
UDP TCP
--------- ------------- ------- ------- ------- ------- -------
manka Linux 2.1.44 25 110 210 136 304
jenolan SunOS 5.5.1 56 210 276 175 360
tanya Linux 2.1.44 25 82 160 112 240
ccpenguin Linux 2.1.44 30 124 234 194 336
*Local* Communication bandwidths in megabytes/second
----------------------------------------------------
Host OS Pipe TCP File Mmap Bcopy Bcopy Mem Mem
reread reread (libc) (hand) read write
--------- ------------- ---- ---- ------ ------ ------ ------ ---- -----
manka Linux 2.1.44 66 71 160 100 178 67 116 154
jenolan SunOS 5.5.1 60 54 133 95 171 66 115 155
tanya Linux 2.1.44 69 48 160 114 194 83 128 176
ccpenguin Linux 2.1.44 56 42 160 100 168 59 104 140
Memory latencies in nanoseconds
(WARNING - may not be correct, check graphs)
--------------------------------------------
Host OS Mhz L1 $ L2 $ Main mem Guesses
--------- ------------- --- ---- ---- -------- -------
manka Linux 2.1.44 167 4 64 264
jenolan SunOS 5.5.1 167 6 41 266
tanya Linux 2.1.44 200 5 85 225
ccpenguin Linux 2.1.44 143 3 43 273
manka, tanya and ccpenguin are Linux 2.1.44 machines, jenolan runs Solaris 2.5.1.
ccpenguin is an Ultra1 140, manka and jenolan Ultra1 170 and tanya Ultra2 200.