Two questions about the 3b1

DoN Nichols dnichols at ceilidh.beartrack.com
Wed May 29 14:12:04 AEST 1991


In article <10144 at idunno.Princeton.EDU> yong at pupthy.princeton.edu (Young Rene) writes:
>-Don't count on it!
>-	X-Windows is great if you have MIPS and RAM and disk capacity to 
>-spare.  According to a recent Unix Week artical (13 May, 1991 p55) the 
>-minimum functional X-Windows system needs 4MIPS.  We get about 1MIPS out 
>-of the well loved 3b1.  It goes on the say that a networked X-Manager needs
>-approximately "1/2 to 1 gigabyte of additional fileserver diskspace..." for
>-swapping.  Call me kooky, but the 67meg 3b1 limit looks a bit puny in 
>-comparison.  To top it all off, the stated RAM requirements look to be about
>-16meg for X11R4.

	Well, the /usr/bin/X11 directory on my Sun 2/120 (68010 cpu, 10MHZ)
is about 16MB, but the executable Xsun is only about a Megabyte.  If there
is adequate resolution on the 3b1's screen (though I don't see it running
the 80x65 xterm windows legibly) I guess that it could be persuaded to run
X11R4, but I'd re-format that hard disk, giving more space to swap, since
there are LOTS of 1/2MEG executables in that directory, and you tend to have
several loaded at any given time.  Nothing is shown by size(1) to be bigger
than 1MB, and virtual memory is a wonderful thing.  (But don't ask ME to
port it! :-)

	As far as speed goes, The sun benchmarks out just a bit faster on
the dhrystone than the 3b1, both using gcc.  However, screen writes are
significantly faster to my perception in the Sun, so I guess that there's
lots of special hardware in the Sun helping out there.

	Happy porting
		Don.

-- 
Donald Nichols (DoN.)		| Voice (Days):	(703) 664-1585
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