Re: SS5/170

[Ari Heitner <aheitner@andrew.cmu.edu>]

On Sat, 4 Nov 2000, Ragga Muffin wrote:

> Joshua Uziel <uzi@uzix.org> wrote:
> 
> > Debian on my SS5/170 would lock up for no known reason after about 2
> > days if I left it idle... no messages, no nothing.  This was with
> > potato, a little before its release.  Meanwhile, my SS5/70 and SS5/110
> > are rock solid for me...
> 
> SS5/110 is rock solid with 2.2.16. (and was with 2.2.14)
> 
> I've had some oopses and/or vm problems (disk trashing) with 2.2.17.
> 
> Is this a known problem BTW ?
> 

Um, I don't know about the kernel.

The TurboSPARC (the 170 MHz 32bit SPARC, iirc made by Toshiba) certainly is. I
remember a couple of very long discussions about this chip, both here and i
think on the sparcbook lists.

As far as I could ever make out, a great many versions of these chips (or
possibly all versions) had terminal hardware bugs that would crash anything but
Solaris (which either worked around them, or more likely was the only OS
Toshiba ran in simulator when they designed the things, so therefore the only
one checked to work before the first die was cut ...).

It was never entirely cleear to me whether there were in fact some late
revisions of the chip that did work right, or whether in fact all chips would
crash under load (but some would run stably, as reported here, if not under
load). Nor do I have any reference hardware revision numbers to tell you "later
than this has a halfway decent chance". I don't think there was ever any
agreement on a working-after revision/date.

...

I can report at the least that sun4c's (as someone mentioned iirc) have no
significant problems, i've been using them most of the way thru the 2.2 series
(in fact i was using them even before that, i think a few of the 2.0 kernels
were quirky on them). I think the SS170 is a sun4m (someone wanna back me up or
cut me down on that? it's not a sun4d i'm pretty sure ...)  anyhow. And those
work dandy. 

Have to admit I haven't tried 2.2.17 on my IPX, just no inclination to. I guess
I should but I need my CVS/web stuff all running :)


Cheers,

Ari