The M3000 is the peak of Sun here and have tried quite few of the older
Ultra machines as well. The M series was unusual, for Sun anyway, in
that there is a management monitor, XSCF that talks to each cpu
domain via an internal tcp/ip network. The M3000 is single socket, up
to 4 cores at about 2.6Ghz and has a single domain, but the
other M series can have N processors, N domains. You can reach the obp
monitor for each domain / cpu via the XSCF monitor, which has a whole
raft of functionality for system management, error detection and
logging and more. The fly in the ointment for desktop use is the fact
that there is no usb port to connect a keyboard and mouse, but that
is fixed by using a pci-e usb card, with an hcl supported chipset.
Then, you can put in a sun supported graphics, add a symbolic link to
point to fb0 and voila, a desktop login screen appears. M series was
built by Fujitsu in Japan afiak and that's reflected in the obsessive
attention to detail and functionality of the XSCF management engine,
not to mention the hardware quality. Never needed to be rebooted, or
crashed in 4 years of 24x7 use here, other than for admin reasons.
Firefox performance is not good, never properly sorted before the
development team was shutdown, but otherwise, the fastest Sparc
machine ever used here and worth a look. Solaris 10 is really the
only game in town, though the Debian / Sparc group is active and
busy.
So much interesting hardware around now, much of it at almost scrap
prices...
Chris