jgb@ektools.UUCP (Blose) (03/15/90)
I recently posted a request to all M/120 and/or 3240 users asking for reviews on their systems. The response overall was favorable although several people complained of an occasional system hang. Since I received some mail from people asking to see the responses, I thought I would post the results to the net. BTW, thanks to all those who responded! Enjoy. Joanne Greene-Blose ..kodak!ektools!jgb ----------------------------------------------------------------- In-Reply-To: <2495@ektools.UUCP> Organization: Basser Dept of Computer Science, University of Sydney, Australia Cc: We have 4 M120s and 1 3240, each with 40 or 48Mb. The machines have not exhibited any hardware problems, 4 M120s here since Jan '89, the 3240 only since Feb '90. Only service performed was to upgrade an rs232 board on one machine so that it could be supported by a new O/S release. The software is another story, we have a "hanging kernel" bug that seems to take down a very loaded system about once a day, load dependent. It seems to be connected with (local?) socket activity. Overall they work fine, we have 20-30 undergrads per machine via ethernet terminal servers, later to be X-terminals. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: uunet!SKORPIO.USask.ca!protsko Subject: Mips M/120 To: atexnet!kodak!ektools!jgb@dvinci.USask.ca Joanne We have had a Mips M/120 in operation since last August. It has 32 Mb Ram and about 1 Gb of disk. We are in the process of adding another 660 Mb of disk. It has been fairly reliable. It hasn't had any hardware problems but has in the last four months developed a 'getting hung up' problem. It appears that it is running out of swap space (we only have the minimum required so it is a possiblity) but we suspect it has more to do with some nettwork problem. The disk space I mentioned is only used for system files and locally installed software (source and binaries). Our user files (about 2 Gb) are served via NFS from a Sun 3/180. We don't have software support so haven't talked to MIPS about the problem. We have about 20 users at a time running things like cpu-intensive simulations, reading mail and netnews, document preparation, and a major X client host. Execpt when it is begin to get hung up, there has been no problems with response. On the whole we are very pleased with the system and the response Mips has given us. Beth Protsko Department of Computational Science Univ. of Saskatchewan -------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Dan Davison <uunet!uhnix2.uh.edu!davison> To: jgb@ektools Subject: Re: Attention M/120 users Organization: University of Houston I have had a 3240 since the end of November. There were some problems with the machine at first, but a new CPU card fixed it. It is my personal number cruncher, so I can't comment on multiuser aspects. I have 8MB, and am prevented from buying more by MIPS' unbelieveable prices. I am having trouble getting used to how FAST the machine is on my problems (dynamic-programming class). I have been led to believe that my 3240 was the third machine let out of the lab; one at MIPS, one at MIPS/Denver, and this one. They customer support didn't believe me about the CPU problem until the one in Denver started dropping dead in its tracks too. Was a wiring/timing problem which has been successfully fixed. I have a 660 MB disk, synchronous SCSI, and I'm very pleased with the speed and general performance. I use NFS to mount some databases on a Sun-3/80 and a MicroVax (III?) running Ultrix. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: rochester!rutgers!tekig5.pen.tek.com!tonyr (Tony Rick) To: rochester!kodak!ektools!jgb Subject: Re: Attention M/120 users Organization: Tektronix, Inc., Beaverton, OR. In article <2495@ektools.UUCP> you write: >I'm requesting information that anyone may have on the M/120 machine. >I'd be interested in knowing details such as reliability (up time), how >much RAM your configuration has, how many users you typically have and >how much disk space you have. We have had an m120-5 for a little over a year. The configuration is R2000/R2010 chips, 32Mb memory, 2 328Mb SCSI drives(CDC 94171), 1 663Mb SCSI disk(CDC 94191-766), qic-120 cartridge drive (SCSI), ethernet, RISC/os 4.0. Two of the disks are in a second cabinet. It is used primarily as a compute server on a local network for ASIC development. Access is through the net, and the console. We keep it in our work area. There are usually 3-4 users logged on and one or two large cpu intensive jobs in the background. At the moment its been up for thirty-five days, and I don't have any reason to doubt that it could go on. We reboot every once in awhile out of skepticism (how can ANYTHING stay up that long?). Our benchmarks, a local application mix, show it to have the fastest integer arithmetic in its class. We have RMA support, which means I talk to them on the phone and they send me parts when we figure out what the problem is. Installation and part swapping are straightforward. The only problem my log shows occurred early in its life here, a series of PANIC crashes due to 'Data Bus Error'. MIPS determined that there was a problem with the 24Mb configuration ( we had 3 8Mb boards at the time) that required board matching. They sent me a new board which fixed the problem. If this sounds like a glowing report, well, I guess it is. We are extremely pleased with it's operation. For various reasons we have not upgraded to the R3000/R3010 chip set. One year old and this machine is almost obsolete (sigh). Tony Rick ------------------------------------------------------------------ To: jgb@ektools Subject: Re: Attention M/120 users Newsgroups: comp.sys.mips Hello, I just made a request for info on MIPS based products. I though that maybe you may be interested in the responses I've got, so I've included them here. I have been evaluating an RC3240 (25Mhz R3000) for a few days now and I am quite pleased with the performance. Arul --------------------------------------------------------------- Subject: Advice Sought on MIPS Machines Date: Sat, 03 Mar 90 15:11:56 EST From: arul@sdsu.edu (Arul Ananthanarayanan) Organization: San Diego State University Math Dept. I've got an M/120. 1. Performance: Not a lot to say, as I use the thing pretty much single-user. It is a little less willing than a BSD machine to page really large address spaces gracefully; this is presumably a reflection of the differing design goals of the SysV and 4.3BSD paging algorithms. My machine doesn't really have enough memory, though. 2. Configuration: Would you recommend buying at least one disk drive from MIPS, or going completely third party? 3. Disk Drives: Have you had any trouble using third party SCSI & 8mm. drives such as Imprimis Wren V,VI, VII etc. or using Exabyte 8mm drives? MIPS is using Imprimis drives. I've put third party Imprimis drives on the machine trivially. The MIPS formatter lets you define parameters for drives not supported by MIPS, but why bother when Wrens will do? No idea about the Exabyte. 4. Maintenance: What type of service contract do you have? How would and Support: you rate field service, board replacement and phone support? What little experience I've had with their F-S has been very good. My sales rep knows more technical stuff than some of the other vendor's f-s people... 5. OS: Are you able to keep your BSD users happy under Risc/OS? Have you had any major trouble porting applications that assume a 4.3BSD environment while using systype bsd43. In my opinion the 4.3 support is -extremely- strong. It is pretty unusual for something to not work right off the bat. 6. Networking: Is Risc/OS a good citizen in that it is easy to get things like the latest versions of gated, sendmail and named up and running without too much effort? The kernel code is more up to date than most vendors manage. The MIPS mail system is an odd hybrid of SysV and sendmail which might make some sense for commercial non-internet sites or SysV shops. You might just throw it all away and run 4.3 code (which works fine). We run MMDF. Most everything else we've ported works fine, which is not a surprise because it's really a 4.3 networking system. The only area that requires any thought is programs that use pty's; the mips pty driver is streams-based. Supports the 4.3 IOCTLs though. I like this machine a lot. John Wroclawski MIT Lab for Computer Science ------------------------------------------------------------------ From: David Collier-Brown <davecb@nexus.yorku.ca> To: Arul Ananthanarayanan <arul@sdsu.edu> Subject: Re: Advice Sought on MIPS Machines In comp.sys.mips you write: | I have had little or no experience with MIPS based products, so naturally | I have some questions: Well, here's our experience with an R2000, and a request: Post the summarized results... | We are looking for a new machine to replace our departmental time sharer and | one of the machines we are considering is a MIPS RC3260. (R3000 @25Mhz) | 1. Performance: How well does the machine perform under a load? | Of course this depends on what you consider a 'load', but | assume general University environment with 20 or so | concurrent users running TeX, large compiles, heavy | number crunching etc. Our machine, Titan, was tested with musbus and the "old-fashioned software developer" load to ensure that we could support at least 40 users who fit that model. Sucessfully: I couldn't even find the knee in the curve before the machine I was using to simulate the terminals bottlenecked... The machine behaves well with several very heavy numeric jobs eating 85% of the cpu, hardly slowing interactive or NFS response at all. | 2. Configuration: Would you recommend buying at least one disk drive from | MIPS, or going completely third party? We went Mips, for convenience. (Ie, no opinion) | 3. Disk Drives: Have you had any trouble using third party SCSI | & 8mm. drives such as Imprimis Wren V,VI, VII etc. or | using Exabyte 8mm drives? We got an Exabyte from Mips (Again, no opinion: sorry!) | 4. Maintenance: What type of service contract do you have? How would | and Support: you rate field service, board replacement and phone | support? Quite decent in Canada. | 5. OS: Are you able to keep your BSD users happy under Risc/ OS? | Have you had any major trouble porting applications that | assume a 4.3BSD environment while using systype bsd43. We're not all that sure... some applications ported instantly, some foundered on the problems of getting all the non-portable bits found in the right include directories (the compiler knows where to look, but **I** don't, which makes it arbitrarily hard). We've had more compiler (parser) problems than real portability problems. | 6. Networking: Is Risc/OS a good citizen in that it is easy to get things | like the latest versions of gated, sendmail and named | up and running without too much effort? No opinion (yet). Titan hasn't been accepted as a full-support machine yet, and is frozen at a known/supported level so we can use Mips to do our work for us (:-)). | Any information would be greatly appreciated. Please send replies by | e-mail. I will send summaries to those that request them. Again, I'd recomend posting the results, in several postings if you get lots of quotable answers. --dave --------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Laurence G. Yaffe <lgy@newton.phys.washington.edu> To: arul@sdsu.edu (Arul Ananthanarayanan) Subject: Re: Advice Sought on MIPS Machines My research group runs a MIPS M/2000 plus two RC2030's. We've been quite pleased with our decidion to go with MIPS. Performance is very good, and I find the burden of system management to be fairly small. (Better than dealing with Dec or Sun.) We've had no trouble with a 3rd party Wren VI on one of our 2030s. I've had no trouble building up-to-date versions of sendmail and other mail related programs, but have been happy to run the MIPS-supplied versions of things like named, gated, etc. I don't have time to be much more specific now. Feel free to give me a call if you'd like more information (206-543-3902). -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Laurence G. Yaffe Internet: lgy@newton.phys.washington.edu University of Washington Bitnet: yaffe@uwaphast.bitnet Subject: Re: Advice Sought on MIPS Machines In article <1990Mar3.073759.10@sdsu.edu>, arul@sdsu (Arul Ananthanarayanan) wri tes: > >We are looking for a new machine to replace our departmental time sharer and >one of the machines we are considering is a MIPS RC3260. (R3000 @25Mhz) > This is one of the low-boy cabinet versions of the M-2000, right? We have an M-2000 as our main departmental machine. I should start by saying that I am *mostly* happy with the system. The hardware is *very* dependable. The local MIPS office is *very* helpful. The software (overall) is good, though it does have some problems (however, I don't think that it has any more problems that any other systems). >I have had little or no experience with MIPS based products, so naturally >I have some questions: > >1. Performance: How well does the machine perform under a load? > Of course this depends on what you consider a 'load', but > assume general University environment with 20 or so > concurrent users running TeX, large compiles, heavy > number crunching etc. > We use ours for general TeX and troff stuff, large compiles (MIPS cc and Gnu cc) and computationally intensive biological sequence analysis. Overall we are very happy!!! There are only two cases where I've seen performance suffer: 1) When a large number (e.g. 10+) of compute jobs get started up at once things can slow to a crawl for a minute or so. The common element of these jobs is that they allocate memory like crazy in the initial stages of their life. I think that any system might slow down a bit when faced with this (but am still checking it out). 2) When a program runs out of swap space the entire machine thrashes until it gets rebooted. I've done with with some of our own stuff, and by tickling a bug in MIPS make/ar. I realize that running out of swap space is a problem, but it doesn't seem like it should necessitate rebooting the machine. I think that both of these problems are related to the virtual memory system, and may be corrected/changed in newer releases. We'll see. >2. Configuration: Would you recommend buying at least one disk drive from > MIPS, or going completely third party? We bought one from MIPS and one from third party. MIPS isn't cheap, but it's nice to have them standing behind the main disk. We just bought another Interphase controller from them so that we can put two used Fujitsu Eagles (from our retired Pyramid) on line. Don't know how hard it's going to be. >3. Disk Drives: Have you had any trouble using third party SCSI > & 8mm. drives such as Imprimis Wren V,VI, VII etc. or > using Exabyte 8mm drives? We use SMD drives. Don't know about SCSI on MIPS systems. >4. Maintenance: What type of service contract do you have? How would > and Support: you rate field service, board replacement and phone > support? We have software support and board swap. Getting hardware fixed hasn't been a problem. We had to exchange a DOA ethernet board when we got the machine and haven't had any other problems. Software problems have been more problematical. We had one *serious* problem with NFS that got fixed before it became a critical problem (with a new kernel .o module). Most of our other problems have had to wait for patches or new releases. I've had some good conversations with knowledgeable tech people and some others with under-informed "specialists". Usually the problem is that parts of the support shop have a sysV background, and I tend to break the BSD stuff. >5. OS: Are you able to keep your BSD users happy under Risc/OS? > Have you had any major trouble porting applications that > assume a 4.3BSD environment while using systype bsd43. We are a BSD shop; the SysV base of RISC/os was one of our major concerns. General user programs compile with no problems. Even "systemy" programs, like tcsh (based on 4.3-tahoe csh), compile without too much trouble. I've gotten bash (FSF's sh replacement) and BLSS (a statistics program from Berkeley's math/stat's department [written in Fortran and C]) to compile by telling the config stuff that I was building for a BSD VAX [with some other small changes for BLSS]. Several areas are a pain in the ass though: 1) curses/termcap stuff for BSD is a mess. For example, its idea of an efficient redraw (for an example from a book on curses) is to repaint the entire screen. I punted and just ported the 4.3bsd libcurses and libtermlib. It's a pain 'cause I have to maintain both terminfo and termcap databases, but at least it works. 2) anything that depends on working with an executable file. Stuff that has to work with the files (e.g. undump a core file or dynamically load a .o) can be made to work, with a bit of work. Don't get your hopes up if you want to do any type of compiler work on the machine. Not only do they not use a.out or coff (and the associated debugging info), but they make it very difficult to work with their weird symbol tables. You can't use pseudo-ops in your assembler output (other than for lines and filenames). The only option that I've found (and I haven't tried it yet) is to create their special .T files myself. I wouldn't mind them using something new and different (especially if someone explained why it was better) if they didn't disenfranchise me in the process! 3) terminal (tty/termio) handling can get pretty weird. The common cases work, but sometimes things get trashed. >6. Networking: Is Risc/OS a good citizen in that it is easy to get things > like the latest versions of gated, sendmail and named > up and running without too much effort? We've had few problems with this. See my comments to 5) above. >Any information would be greatly appreciated. I think that my biggest complaint about MIPS is that they don't know the meaning or worth of an OPEN community. They try to control everything for their machines by keeping stuff proprietary that is (formally or informally) common knowledge for other systems (e.g. their object file/symbol table format and the lack of a server and/or client side support in X11R4). The result is that their systems are slightly outside the mainstream of the UNIX community, and don't directly benefit from the richness and experience that the community represents. >Please send replies by e-mail. I will send summaries to those that >request them. I'm posting this 'cause I would like to hear others' comments. Like I said, I am generally content with my system and haven't seen anything else on the market in it's class that I would rather have. Everything I mentioned above except the make/ar funniness has been run past MIPS customer support at one point or another, so there shouldn't be any rude surprises for them. Release 4.5 is reputed to fix/improve a large number of my complaints; I am looking forward to it with great anticipation! g. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Larry Bouzane <larry@stretch.cs.mun.ca> To: <arul@sdsu.edu> Subject: Re: Advice Sought on MIPS Machines >We are looking for a new machine to replace our departmental time sharer and >one of the machines we are considering is a MIPS RC3260. (R3000 @25Mhz) >1. Performance: How well does the machine perform under a load? > Of course this depends on what you consider a 'load', but > assume general University environment with 20 or so > concurrent users running TeX, large compiles, heavy > number crunching etc. We replaced our vaxes (11/780, 11/750, 11/730) with 3 M/120s with 16-24 Megs of memory each. I believe the M/120 is the (R2000 @16.67Mhz) predecessor of the RC3260. The performance improvement was astonishing. We average about 20 users per machine using text editors, running tex/latex, reading mail/news and (usually) small compiles. This load does not seem to impact the machine at all. We rarely have number crunching programs running for extended periods but have not noticed any performance degradation when there is only one such program running. >2. Configuration: Would you recommend buying at least one disk drive from > MIPS, or going completely third party? >3. Disk Drives: Have you had any trouble using third party SCSI > & 8mm. drives such as Imprimis Wren V,VI, VII etc. or > using Exabyte 8mm drives? The 94171 (328M) drives that came with the machines have not been very reliable. We have had to replace at least 3 94171s. The 94191s (663M) drives have not given us any problems at all. We have not had any difficulties with our Exabyte 8mm tape backup system (we love it!). >4. Maintenance: What type of service contract do you have? How would > and Support: you rate field service, board replacement and phone > support? We have a parts replacement service contract with MIPS. When there is a problem, we phone up their service people, describe the problem and the replacement part (in our case this part was usually a replacement drive) is here the next day. The actually replacement of the disk drive or CPU board is very straight forward and takes only a couple of minutes. Replacing a motherboard is a little more involved but MIPS offer a training course which our technical services department has taken advantage of. >5. OS: Are you able to keep your BSD users happy under Risc/OS? > Have you had any major trouble porting applications that > assume a 4.3BSD environment while using systype bsd43. We have found the BSD environment in Risc/OS 4.01 to be very good. Porting of applications is mostly just a recompile. Larry Wall's Configure scripts get very sick though so compiling things like rn, perl, ... is a little harder than on other platforms. >6. Networking: Is Risc/OS a good citizen in that it is easy to get things > like the latest versions of gated, sendmail and named > up and running without too much effort? We have not had any difficultly running newer versions of the software you mention but have found the NFS software to be less than perfect. NFS directories that you mount have a tendency to hang after an indeterminate among of time for no known reason. We find this to happen more frequently with other NFS implementations (ie, Vax 4.3+NFS from MT XINU) but it also happens between the MIPS machines themselves. The frequency of the NFS hangs is just enough to make it annoying (on the order of once a week or so) I would be interested in a summary of the information that you receive either though mail or as a followup to comp.sys.mips Larry Bouzane --------------------------------------------------------------------- From: chip!clapp@trout.nosc.mil To: arul@sdsu.edu Subject: Re: Advice Sought on MIPS Machines We're moving from VMS to Unix, so I can't respond (meaningfully...) to your BSD questions. We have three MIPS machines: an older M/1000, a large M/2000 and - just recently - an RC3260. The RC3260 seems to be an excellent value. It has enough VME space to be a usable machine - the only issue is where to hang the disks. Our users are currently on the M/2000. We run a general time-sharing load (mostly text processing) with about 20 concurrent users (peaks near 40 users). The only performance issue we've found so far is to have enough physical memory. The OS is getting better at paging (and 4.5 is supposed to be even better), but we had to get to 64 meg to handle our load. Particularly if folks are running the optimizing compilers - 32 meg will barely handle a single user on non-trivial source. I've had good luck adding 3rd party disk (both SCSI & SMD), although having to go standalone to format/verify is an inconvenience. 8mm Exabyte is supported on both machines - no problems there. Let me know if I can offer any more details... -- David Clapp chip!clapp@nosc.mil ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: rogerk@mips.COM (Roger B.A. Klorese) Subject: Re: Advice Sought on MIPS Machines Reply-To: rogerk@mips.COM (Roger B.A. Klorese) Organization: MIPS Computer Systems, Sunnyvale, CA I'd like to add some "informed" detail to some of George Hartzell's points. Obviously, I'm somewhat biased ;-) in Mips' favor... In article <17755@boulder.Colorado.EDU> hartzell@boulder.Colorado.EDU (George H artzell) writes: > >3. Disk Drives: Have you had any trouble using third party SCSI > > & 8mm. drives such as Imprimis Wren V,VI, VII etc. or > > using Exabyte 8mm drives? > >We use SMD drives. Don't know about SCSI on MIPS systems. We use the Wren IV, Wren VI, and Exabyte ourselves. Check with us on the appropriate firmware revs. > 1) curses/termcap stuff for BSD is a mess. For example, its idea > of an efficient redraw (for an example from a book on > curses) is to repaint the entire screen. I punted and just > ported the 4.3bsd libcurses and libtermlib. It's a pain 'cause I > have to maintain both terminfo and termcap databases, but at > least it works. That's what we've done too. The 4.50 SysV environment uses SVR3.2 terminfo, and the BSD environment uses 4.3-Tahoe termcap. >I think that my biggest complaint about MIPS is that they don't know >the meaning or worth of an OPEN community. They try to control >everything for their machines by keeping stuff proprietary that is >(formally or informally) common knowledge for other systems (e.g. >their object file/symbol table format and the lack of a server and/or >client side support in X11R4). The result is that their systems are >slightly outside the mainstream of the UNIX community, and don't >directly benefit from the richness and experience that the community >represents. We are working on making more of this information available. The symbol table information is documented in the "MIPS Assembly Language Programmer's Guide," though the .T file is not. As for X11R4, we are working on making the mips.cf file for clients available; we should have word soon. On the server side, though, we have a case of "too much too soon": we are working on server enhancements for as-yet-unannounced systems, on X11R4 compatibility, and on performance optimization at the same time. Perhaps larger companies would ship this as a bunch of separate releases. Simply put, we just don't have the bandwidth through our QA/Test/Release group to do this, so we find ourselves "batching" things into larger packages than you (or I, as a user) might like. This will change with growth, I believe. -- ROGER B.A. KLORESE MIPS Computer Systems, Inc. phone: +1 408 720-2939 MS 4-02 928 E. Arques Ave. Sunnyvale, CA 94086 rogerk@mips.COM -------------------------------------------------------------------- >1. Performance: How well does the machine perform under a load? The M/2000 performs well under load. The drive controllers could be smarter, but short of having extra processors or IPI they did the best possible. > concurrent users running TeX, large compiles, heavy Note that large compiles are memory hungry. Get all the RAM you can. >2. Configuration: Would you recommend buying at least one disk drive from > MIPS, or going completely third party? I'd go all MIPS. There isn't a big enough market for the third parties to have all the little platform specific things figured out. Its not like going SI for DEC. I can't comment on the other goodies. Don't know. >5. OS: Are you able to keep your BSD users happy under Risc/OS? Have you had any major trouble porting applications that assume a 4.3BSD environment while using systype bsd43. Had a hell of a time moving test suites over. Getting better with each release though. Happy Hacking. -- INTERNET: arul@sdsu.edu work: (619) 594-7207 UUCP: sdsu!arul home: (619) 583-0439