Oracle DAX Driver Landing In Linux 4.16 For SPARC Co-Processor

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Oracle DAX Driver Landing In Linux 4.16 For SPARC Co-Processor

After sending in the many networking subsystem updates yesterday, veteran kernel developer David Miller today sent in the SPARC architecture updates for Linux 4.16 that includes a new Oracle DAX driver...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=SPARC-Oracle-DAX-Driver

[jacob]

I didn't even know SPARC support for Linux was still maintained.

[schmidtbag]

I just realized, but I wonder if the SPARC architecture would be ideal for mining. You get a lot of threads at clock speeds higher than what you normally find in GPUs. Though I would love to see crypto mining go away, the cash flow toward SPARC could help bring balance to the hardware market, where consumer-level hardware would become cheaper and SPARC, a largely irrelevant architecture, could get a much needed cash influx. PPC might be an even better choice than SPARC, though.

I didn't even know SPARC support for Linux was still maintained.

What else would? To my knowledge, there's no Mac or Windows support, and if there is FreeBSD support, I'm sure it's entirely community maintained. Oracle's Solaris isn't really a thing anymore, and to my knowledge it was mostly just a Linux derivative. So, that just leaves Linux.

[cb88]

I just realized, but I wonder if the SPARC architecture would be ideal for mining. You get a lot of threads at clock speeds higher than what you normally find in GPUs. Though I would love to see crypto mining go away, the cash flow toward SPARC could help bring balance to the hardware market, where consumer-level hardware would become cheaper and SPARC, a largely irrelevant architecture, could get a much needed cash influx. PPC might be an even better choice than SPARC, though.


What else would? To my knowledge, there's no Mac or Windows support, and if there is FreeBSD support, I'm sure it's entirely community maintained. Oracle's Solaris isn't really a thing anymore, and to my knowledge it was mostly just a Linux derivative. So, that just leaves Linux.

Sparc64 in it's current iteration is a database beast... but only competitive in other areas of performance if you disregard it's price. They have at least unified the variants of sparc so you no longer have to deal with slow single threaded performance on thier boxes that are geared more toward web/database than HPC its all one processor design now.

That said, the ROI is probably way way better on a EPYC or Threadripper than Sparc.

[cb88]

Sparc32 support is still maintained as far as that goes all the way back to sun4m (sun4c was dropped as it doesn't share enough similarities to modern embedded sparc like Leon).

[monraaf]

I didn't even know SPARC support for Linux was still maintained.

> http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/se...c-3665558.html
> https://oss.oracle.com/projects/linux-sparc/
> https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/p...-NETINST-1.iso
> https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:SPARC

[coder]

Does anyone know how this thing compares with using GPUs for doing the same? I know people have been using GPUs for accelerating databases since the early days of GPGPU - I assume that's where they got the idea.