On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 12:59 PM, Robert Healey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Does anyone else have a large installation of sun4m architecture > machines it would be nice to run something other than Linux/NetBSD on? > > SS20, SS5, SS10, various server 4m machines.
Solaris 10 and later only support 64-bit on sparc - a 32 bit sparc kernel does not exist. Further, the (MMU of the) UltraSPARC I CPU is not supported. As such, the oldest/slowest sparc machine that you can have a reasonable expectation of support on is an Ultra 2. FWIW, I'm pretty sure that the x86 side has a similar story. I think that there was a discussion a while back as to whether i586 and earlier were really important and the answer (as I recall - I could be wrong) was that they weren't. i586 (Pentium) systems were nice systems when the SS20 was a nice system. The one that I bought had 16 MB of RAM - which was about 4x what the typical box back then had. As I recall 32 MB - 64 MB was a respectable amount of memory in a SS 20 back then. It was also common to install software from floppies, QIC tapes (which, contrary to their name felt slow) or if you were lucky you had a dual-speed CD-ROM (300 KB/sec read speed). This class of hardware is way below the minimum requirements for installing OpenSolaris (the distro) and is frankly not even on par with many (most?) embedded systems these days. The geek in me does lament that Linux makes more sense than OpenSolaris on a SS 5 or SS 20. The part of me that is likely to write code or do productive things with hardware says that I'd rather work on something with at least three digits before "MHz". -- Mike Gerdts http://mgerdts.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ indiana-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/indiana-discuss
