Re: OpenBSD for a firewall/router

[Chuck Yerkes <chuck+obsd_(_at_)_2004_(_dot_)_snew_(_dot_)_com>]

Quoting Honz (honz_(_at_)_tokers_(_dot_)_ca):
> Offshooting the topic just a little; I'm relatively new to sun's
> architecture on sparc's and ultra machines. I'm wondering, approximately,
> how, say an Ultra 5 400MHz machine translates to something in the i386
> world? So far all that has come across my path is that my SparcStations w.
> ROSS processors are "486's on steroids".

How to they translate...  Well, for what?  is the big missing bit of
info.  To firewall a T1?  You'll be having both wait, one more than
another, but do you care if it's 10% busy or 20%?


The SPARC chips are fine and lovely RISC processors.  MHz:MHz far
faster than Intel CISC chips.  They gave them annoying names which
no clear hierarchy.  So I never remember the order - somethinglike
   Mondo -> Super -> Turbo -> Hyper
(ok, made up mondo and I know Hyper was the Ross last one).

Ultra's are 64 bit CPUs (huge address space) and a 400MHz will
smoke a P2/600 pretty easily.  That family is Ultra I/II/III/IV.
They've canceled the V and the IV is mostly just dual III cores
on one chip.

x86 chips are NOW largely hybrid.  RISC and CISC have, in many
ways, functionally merged in many ways.  At least the clear lines
of 1988 are less clear.


The U5 box was designed to be a cheap cheap desktop PC competitor.
In 1997 or 98.  The PCI slots are 32bit/33MHz (eg, not really fast).
It comes with a pig slow IDE drive (4200 RPM, AFAIR) and several
other architectural shortcuts.  Which kept the cost down (for a Sun).

The speed of the CPU depends on the age of the machine (duh); they
put faster chips in later machines.

Floating point?  Ultra's will smoke an Intel box.  My 1.2GHz SPARCs
eat the 3+GHz Xeons on math.

But I don't work with math that much (and SSL is just integer IIRC).
I deal with IO and network throttled things.

The Ultra 5 can be "enspeedened" with a decent SCSI card.  A different
IDE drive can even help a lot.