Sun's W2100z Dual Opteron Workstation
by Kristopher Kubicki on October 27, 2004 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
Solaris 10
Getting to see Solaris 10 for the first time was something that we were excited about as well. Solaris 10 x86 runs an abstract translation layer called Project Janus. Even though Solaris already behaves very similarly to Linux, the underlying system hooks and calls differ. Janus claims about a five percent decrease in performance, but proprietary features such as the N1 Grid Containers and the ZFS Dynamic File System are supposed to offset the performance hit.Solaris 10 also boasts tons of other new features slated for final release, including a rewritten network stack and filter, cryptographic infrastructure and predictive self healing. Unfortunately, like JDS, there are no 64-bit distributions of Solaris on x86 yet. We downloaded an evaluation copy of Solaris 10 b63 to give the operating system a test drive, hopefully on our workstation benchmark.
Solaris 10 didn't get any easier to install since Solaris 9. Our first few attempts at installing the operating system failed, generally looping us in the install/configuration utilities forever. The graphical install was much friendlier on us and once we figured out the basics, Solaris 10 was up and running. Our uname reveals:
# uname - a
SunOS unknown 5.10 s10_63 i86pc i386 i86pc
Click to enlarge.
Solaris 10 supports CDE and GNOME 2.0, and since we are a little more familiar with GNOME, that is what we chose. For many of our benchmarks, we are going to run Solaris binaries. However, some binaries like Maya and Shake do not have Solaris ports. Unfortunately, since Janus has not been integrated into the kernel yet, we cannot run these tests just yet.
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mino - Wednesday, October 27, 2004 - link
#5 I would, putting aside the fact I could not afford one. :(Even despite I'm running Tyan Tiger MP on Fedora C2 ;)
meatless - Wednesday, October 27, 2004 - link
Maybe it was just done for some sort of comparison baseline, but who would actually use RedHat 9 on a brand new dual Opteron workstation?jbond04 - Wednesday, October 27, 2004 - link
Hey Kris, great job on the review. I wanted to let you know that I was pleasantly surprised by your thermal graphs for the inside of the case. I think they're a great idea; and I've never seen them before anywhere else. Keep up the good work.-Scott
Reflex - Wednesday, October 27, 2004 - link
I notice that this system is nearly identical to the IBM Intellistation that just arrived on my test bench today. Even the motherboard is identical, as well as the case(exterier looks a bit different, but interier is the same).Makes me wonder if Sun and IBM are actually building these, or outsourcing them to a third party and sticking thier label on them
phaxmohdem - Wednesday, October 27, 2004 - link
Just when I was complaining of no top teir dual opteron workstations. It's a shame that the way I'd like it configured costs 18,000 bones. Guess it will just be a pipe dream for a while more. God help our wallets when they release the w4100z Quad opteron workstation ;)Denial - Wednesday, October 27, 2004 - link
I like to give one a test drive myself, but I'll let others be the guinea pigs.madeira - Thursday, August 18, 2011 - link
good nightWhere can I find the BIOS (donwload) to update,
The oracle - no longer provides soporte.
I need physical BIOS or software update
Could you help me please!