UltraPenguin 1.0

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:

What UltraSparc machines are currently supported?

Ultra 1 desktop systems
Ultra 2 desktop and some server systems

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.

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-)

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:

It is free (you have full source code for kernel and most of the userland programs (with the exception of commercial binary only programs))
It is fast (it tries to get most of the wonderful features of the SPARC v9 and the UltraSPARC chip - the speed increase from running the same program on Solaris 2.5.1 may be really big - see following lmbench numbers
It is 64bit - no need to limit yourself to 4G of virtual memory. Also, your programs can make use of full 64bit registers
It has virtual consoles, unlike Solaris, where the console is nearly unusable and whoever wants to actually do something must run X Window immediately
It runs nearly all SunOS binaries and some Solaris binaries

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.

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-)