Re: [GENERAL] advice on buying sun hardware to run postgres

Bruce Momjian wrote:

> When you get above two processor, the SMP method used by Linux, FreeBSD,
> BSD/OS, etc do not work as well as a kernel-level SMP like Solaris.

"kernel-level"? All SMP is kernel level. Solaris does much better but
there is no fundamental architectural difference as far as I know.

> In the Linux/*BSD SMP, you can only run a kernel call on
> one processor at a time.

If that was true, why has Linus just spent 2 years making kernel locks
more fine grained? If you could only run one kernel call at once anyway
then they must have wasted their time eh?

> IDE does not allow multiple outstanding request, can not access multiple
> disks at the same time, and requires more CPU to do the transfer than
> SCSI.  This last point is normally forgotten.

Surely IDE can handle multiple disks at the same time if they are on a
different controller.