[CentOS] Centos for SPARC- when?

Thu Oct 6 21:57:57 UTC 2005
Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu>

On Tuesday 04 October 2005 06:42, Chris Mauritz wrote:
> Plant, Dean wrote:
> >The Centos website talks about a SPARC release, how is this coming on?
> >and is there an approximate release date?

> Just curious...why would you want to run CentOS on a sparc system
> instead of Slowlaris?  Or have I just answered my own question?  8-)

Can't answer for Dean, but I know that here, where I have three donated 
Enterprise xx00's (an E600, and E5500, and an E6500), three donated E450's, 
and lots of other donated smaller boxes, and having run my e-mail server on 
an Ultra 30 running Aurora for 4 years, I can say that CentOS/SPARC would get 
used here for the simple reason that that brings consistency in my setup, 
since I use CentOS 4 as my standard Linux here on Intel.  Depending upon 
kernel (the 2.6.11 and 2.6.12 kernels have some improvements in SPARC64 
support relative to the 2.6.9 kernel in RHEL4, backports notwithstanding, and 
the Aurora SPARC project is beyond the CentOS 4 versions on several packages.  
I'm running the Aurora FC3 prerelease (if you call the Aurora Rawhide, aka 
'Corona' aka 'Kashmir' a prerelese) on the E6500 now (14 CPU's, 16GB of RAM, 
and usable interactively with a load average exceeding 230 (under a load test 
using apachebench against a koha admin page to stress-test the system: 256 
concurrent users, 6 pages per second, 250000 total requests, load average of 
244, and a USABLE SYSTEM! On my Intel boxes a load average of 6 or above 
usually means a very close to unusable system.....)) and it works very well.

I'd prefer to run something at least close to my standard desktop system for 
consistency's sake while still leveraging the > $1 million donation.

Oh, the other reason I might want to run CentOS/SPARC is to help build 
CentOS/SPARC to give back to the CentOS community.  That 14 CPU E6500 should 
make a nice buildbox.
-- 
Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC  28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu