Fantastic! I can't wait to fire up my sb1000 again!
I have an xvr1200 but I have pretty much determined I will never be able
to use that card again....
Do you know what card would work best? I have an ati radeon (xvr 100?)
card and a couple of those monstrous creator3ds.
On 07/30/12 02:13 AM, Martin Bochnig wrote:
Hi,
yes, I resumed work a few weeks ago.
X11: problem solved(!)
And weather SPARC is dead or not, I still have 18 SPARC boxes here in my room.
Fully equipped with all existing frame buffers that ever existed
(except XVR-200, XVR-300, XVR-1000 and XVR-1200 at this time, because
I had sold them).
I also have a T1000 now with PCIe x1 to x16 Adapter. Although this box
has not even USB and only a single narrow PCEe slot, I could test the
XVR-2500 that way. And OBP detects it as boot-console, although the
T1000 was never intended to run in a non-headless configuration
On SPARC I no longer fiddle with libdevinfo, libpciaccess and Xorg
(weather libpciaccess based or old xserver 1.2), but instead I
focussed on getting Xsun to function, which Alan Coopersmith has
thankfully opensourced 2 years ago in his spare time, just in the
first, last and probably only ever moment it was possible (BIG
THANKS!).
BTW: If you visit Oracle's site, SPARC is still quite well and kicking.
http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/servers/sparc-enterprise/t-series/sparc-t4-processor-ds-497205.pdf
Or which other vendor can offer a comparable CPU with up to 64 threads
running at up to 3.0GHz?
Letting alone the low power consumption per cycle.
My only problem with Illumos as code-base is, that much stuff
belonging to legacy SPARC hardware (which includes all workstations)
seems to have been dropped from Illumos.At least that was my first
impression a month ago. And for this reason I based my initial
version of SPARC-OpenIndiana on Nevada 125 for the first demo release.
That way I intend to convince folks, that we should merge in the
missing platform specific pieces.
But one step after another.
After I had promised things in the past, this time I did not want to
make _any_ public announcement, until the SPARC-OI demo iso is ready
for download.
Now that you started such a thread, staying silent was no longer an option.
Yeas, there will be SPARC-OI.
My personal goal is and always has been, that we can offer a
functioning X-Windows.
So it shouldn't be a server-only release, limited to serial console/RSC/Alom.
And thanks to Alan's openXsun open-sourcing contribution, this dream
has *finally* come true.
The code can be found at
http://dlc.sun.com/osol/x/downloads/openXsun/openXsun.tar.bz2 and is a
stripped cut-down version. But meanwhile I added some missing
functions to build/link it sucessfully. Plus it even functions now on
my test machines
(U1/U2/U5/U10/U30/U60/U80/SB100/SB150/SB1000/SB1500R/SB1500S/SB2000/SB2500R/SB2500S/Tadpole
SPARCle/T1000). It only took a few days and was a child's game when
compared to what is required to modify libdevinfo/libpciaccess/Xorg to
get only a small number of frame buffers working, with instabilities,
minute-long PCI-scanning delays, crashes and bus errors.
openXsun works now with my additions and it is a heaven's gift.
Please give me 4 weeks for the preliminary SPARC-OI release.
Everything incl. of course the src modifications will be released.
Thanks for your patience,
regards,
Martin
On Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 4:51 PM, Jim Klimov <jimkli...@cos.ru> wrote:
Hello all,
There are some discussions about whether illumos on SPARC is
a dead-end or not (i.e. whether it is stupid to buy HW systems
from the one vendor and not buy their software support, or if
there is more than one vendor, or if anyone would pick up the
open-sourced processor designs for the Niagaras and build some
cool appliances or servers). So, just for the anecdotal sake,
I wanted to share this weekend's experience about OpenSolaris
on SPARC - and how it saved the day.
While it may seem unlikely at this moment that new SPARC
systems would be rolled out for OI to get installed on them,
there are many already-deployed reliable boxes which would
run obsolete (or our new) software "until they fscking die".
I was asked to look at a T2000 with Sol 10u8 which did just
that: it died during what could have been fsck - if ZFS had
one. Apparently, the system's users did nothing formally
invalid, they were just zfs-sending and zfs-receiving some
datasets within the pool in order to recompress older data
with gzip-9, then they tried to destroy the older dataset
tree and rename the compressed copy to take its place.
Something went wrong, the pool locked up with no IOs taking
place (according to iostat). The "zfs" commands all hung,
however "zpool status" and friends did not. Filesystem
operations also went well, so running zones were properly
stopped and the box was ultimately rebooted. It did not
come back up.
Luckily, there was a Solaris installation server in
that network, so it took a few minutes to prepare a LAN
installation resource from a stashed SXCE snv_129_sparc
image, and boot the T2000 from the network, into single
user mode. OpenSolaris found nothing suspicious about
the data pool and the rpool, imported and exported them
without complaints. While at the rpool, we deleted the
/etc/zfs/zpool.cache file to allow the system to boot
its Solaris 10. It booted, but also hung at subsequent
"zpool import -R / pool" request - in the same way:
no iostat operations to report, and no errors in the
logs...
Back to the networked boot of OpenSolaris, where we
imported the data pool, destroyed the remaining old
uncompressed datasets and completed the renaming of
compressed datasets to take place of those ones,
transparently to the zones and other consumers.
This did unclog something, so the Solaris 10 image
did afterwards quickly import the pool and happily
uses it today.
Yesterday the old OpenSolaris SXCE for SPARC did
save the day. I can easily imagine hitting some bugs
in ZFS that were fixed after the last SXCE release,
where a hypothetical "OpenIndiana for SPARC" image
would be able to save us - even if it is not (yet)
used as the everyday OS for the box.
Hope this story entertains someone and helps others,
//Jim Klimov
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--
Dr. Daniel Kjar
Assistant Professor of Biology
Division of Mathematics and Natural Sciences
Elmira College
1 Park Place
Elmira, NY 14901
607-735-1826
http://faculty.elmira.edu/dkjar
"...humans send their young men to war; ants send their old ladies"
-E. O. Wilson
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