SPARC Solaris Squeaks Successfully

Aran Lunzer aran at meme.hokudai.ac.jp
Mon Feb 21 23:03:07 UTC 2000


(Re-post of bounced message.)

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: SPARC Solaris Squeaks Successfully
Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2000 19:18:07 +0900
To: Squeak Mail List <squeak at cs.uiuc.edu>
CC: Nathanael Schaerli <n.schaerli at gmx.net>

After various attempts, I now have Squeak 2.7 running happily on our
local SPARC Solaris server thanks to the kind efforts of Nathanael
Schaerli.

So the question is: why did Nathanael have to re-compile to get a
version that run successfully (at least for him and for me) - i.e., that
didn't have BalloonEngine problems?

Here are the results of "squeak -version" for Nathanael's VM:

  sparc-sun-solaris2.6 2.7 #1 XShm Thu Feb 17 09:53:57 MET 2000 gcc
egcs-2.91.66
  SunOS kilana 5.6 Generic_105181-15 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-250

and for the public distribution:

  sparc-sun-solaris2.5.1 2.7 #1  Thu Jan 13 16:24:22 MET 2000 gcc
egcs-2.91.66
  SunOS fricotin.inria.fr 5.5.1 Generic_103640-28 sun4u sparc

Notes:
  - exactly the same compiler
  - the version that works was compiled on 2.6 instead of 2.5.1 - but
then, my system is running 2.5.1 anyway!
  - some difference indicated by the presence of "XShm"?
  - some difference indicated by the presence of "SUNW,Ultra-250"?

Also something undeniably suspicious: all Nathanael's binaries are a
little bigger than the distribution version, apart from Profiler.so
which is a massive 50 times as big (1.6MB)!

It would be nice if we could figure out what's going on here.  Is the
public version simply missing something?


Incidentally - Nathanael wrote:
> By the way: The Solaris version is quite slow. I compiled it 
> using different compilers (sun-cc, egcs), but it was always 
> as slow.

Running the simple benchmarks for 2.7 on our super-macho UltraSPARC
gives 390,000 sends, 9,000,000 bytecodes per second - perfectly fast
enough for use, but evidently less than half the speed of some desktop
Macs/PCs.  But then, the poor thing's already two years old :-)

Bye for now

Aran
-- 
Aran Lunzer                 aran at bigfoot.com
Meme Media Laboratory       lab: +81 11 706 7262 / fax 7808
Hokkaido University
Sapporo 060-8628, JAPAN     http://ca.meme.hokudai.ac.jp/people/aran/





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