Solaris on Intel

UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users
1

I was wondering what features are not available on Solaris installed on Intel architecture as compared to the SPARC archietecture??

:slight_smile:

2

That's an awfully big question. I can't even try to give a complete listing - you'll have to go to sun's website and look for feature listings, whitepapers, and stuff like that.

But the few things that jump immediately to mind are:

  1. The open boot prom you have on sparc won't be there since Intel uses BIOS instead.

  2. Lots of the hardware tools will be missing or behave differently. I'd guess stuff like prtdiag, psrinfo, mpstat, and so on will be different.

  3. Basically, the lower level you get the more different it will be. High level stuff like OS commands, software packages, and add-on tools like gzip, top, etc. should be pretty similar, but lower level stuff that talks directly to the kernel or hardware might change.

3

That's more than enough for me.

Thanks :wink:

4

Some software requires the 64 bit kernel mode and on Intel it runs the 32 bit mode.