wanted: Sun 386 Workstation (Road Runner) info

[Matt Landau]

In comp.unix.questions (<148 at gsg.UUCP>), lew at gsg.UUCP (Paul Lew) writes:
>I would like to find out more information about Road Runner from its user.
>Is it a stable machine to buy?  How about performance compare to other
>product?   Do the 16-bits bus slow it down at all?  Please give your opioion
>only if you actually use it.

Well, now that the machine is announced, I guess it's okay to talk about
it.  I've been dealing with Roadrunners for about the past 2 months, first
in a Sun porting lab (we demo'd some software at the big rollout in Boston)
and subsequently on our own beta machine.

My experience has been that the machine is an abolsute JOY to work with,
notwithstanding a few bugs in the beta test hardware and software.  I don't
know much about performance of the DOS emulation (though I've seen it run
Flight Simulator, Lotus, and Microsoft Windows(!) in its own DOS windows
under SunView, all concurrently) or AT peripherals plugged into the bus.
We'll be doing some work in those areas, but haven't quite gotten there
yet.

What I like about the Roadrunner:

	- The machine is FAST!  Our 386i/250 (8 megs memory) really does
	  deliver about 4 to 5 VAX MIPS in day-to-day use, for raw CPU
	  horsepower.  Even coupled with the relatively slow SCSI disk
	  it beats our Eagle-equipped 3/160 servers by a factor of 2 for
	  compilations, etc.

	- SunOS 4.0 seems quite stable, even in beta test.  There are many
	  nice things in SunOS 4 -- shared libraries, the NFS automounter
	  (file systems can now be made mount on reference), etc.

	- There are many nice Roadrunner-specific additions to SunOS,
	  including volumes (symbolic names mapped to machine:filesystem
	  pairs -- cd to /vol/{symbolic-name} and the appropriate filesystem
	  is automatically mounted), automatic system installation (only
	  really useful on a network of Roadrunners at the moment, but give
	  them time), the interactive help system (must be seen in action),
	  and all of the so-called "EZ Unix" stuff to make the machine a
	  little easier to run without a full time wizard at your disposal.

	- The SunView user interface for SunOS 4.0 has been made cleaner,
	  and many of the tools (textedit, mailtool, etc) seem to be much
	  improved.

	- It's almost completely compatible with the Sun 3 line, but faster
	  than most of them.  I ported 130K lines of code in under a week,
	  the only change being 10 lines of extra code on the Roadrunner
	  [because I was creating my own in-memory pixrect structures
	  without going through libpixrect.a, and there were some extra
	  tweaks needed on the Roadrunner; if you use the library
	  interfaces, you'll never know the difference.]

	  I should point out that this code was already VERY careful about
	  not assuming big-endianism internally.

	- The Organizer is a decent interface to the filesystem, running
	  (excuse me, "launching") applications by double clicking on them,
	  etc. for those who want the Mac Finder on a Sun.

	- Modulo the bugs mentioned below, the DOS emulation stuff seems
	  to be a very nice job.  In particular, they pay attention to
	  things like emulating the PC's physical disk (on a dedicated
	  chunk of disk in $HOME/PC) so that copy-protected software
	  can be installed, emulating a couple of different displays,
	  trying to let you control access to the floppy drive when
	  you have multiple DOS windows running, etc.

What I don't like about the Roadrunner:

	- AT peripherals that do DMA are not working in the beta release of
	  the system.  Sun has promised that this will be fixed by first
	  customer ship.

	- Only relatively low interrupt rates can be sustained on the AT
	  bus.  This is also supposed to be a beta test problem.

	- You cannot debug binaries linked with shared libraries, due to
	  some internal implementation problems in dbx [like, it tries to
	  set a breakpoint on _exit when it starts up, but _exit might not
	  be present until libc is dynamically linked in at runtime].  Sun
	  is apparently working hard on this one, but in the meantime you
	  have to specify static linking if you want to use dbx on the
	  resulting binaries.

	- The COFF object file format only allows 64K line number records to
	  be embedded in a binary, making debugging big programs a pain.  I
	  talked to one of the compiler people at Sun about this once -- it's 
	  a recognized problem, and there are known ways to fix the compilers
	  and debuggers, so I'd expect this limitation to go away later.

	- The automatic installation and EZ Unix stuff are still a little
	  shaky in beta test.  In particular, there's not enough attention
	  (in my opinion) paid to 386i's that have to coexist on existing YP
	  networks with Sun 3's, and to machines that live on the Internet.
	  I can understand this, since Sun is trying to sell Roadrunners
	  into a different market segment, but the fact remains that if you
	  want to hook a Roadrunner up into an existing network, you may
	  need a decent system administrator to get things configured
	  correctly.  On the other hand, if you have an existing network of
	  Suns, you probably already HAVE a decent system administrator.

	- I'm not terribly crazy about the new filesystem layout in
	  SunOS 4.0, especially in view of the fact that Sun, DEC, and
	  UCB all seem to be redoing the filesystem layout, and all
	  in different ways.  This is a pain for those of us who have
	  to manage multiple machine/OS types.

What do I really think about the Sun 386i?  I like it.  A lot.  It's about
the only machine I can imagine wanting to buy for my home.  If I were 
still doing consulting, I could easily recommend it to lots of people.  

It would be a really nice software development environment, for other Suns
or for PC's.  [The company I used to work for did PC development by using
a VAX- or Pyramid-based cross-compiler.  It would have been nice to be 
able to use a Sun-based cross-compliler and test/debug the software right
in another window.]  

It would be a nice financial analyst's machine, especially for those 
people who have a while pile of PC software and data that they don't want 
to throw away, but who have outgrown PC's and want to get into the world
of real computers. :-)

And of course it's a Sun, so it's nice for DTP, CAD, and all those other
uninteresting things that non-hackers do with their Suns now :-)

[DISCLAIMER: I don't work for Sun.  I just like the machine a lot.  
	     I *think* everything I've said above is correct, but
	     I've been dealing with beta test hardware and software,
	     and conditions may have changed.  These are all my own
	     opinions, and BBN has nothing to do with them.]
--
 Matt Landau	       Let not a man glory in this: that he loves his country.
 mlandau at bbn.com        Let him glory rather in this: that he loves his kind.