Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
My patches made it into the kernel somewhere around 2.4.29, there were serial issues which may have been helped by later sparc32 work. Pluto can be made to work with 2.2.x , you will need to read my writeup at http://www.splack.org/fibrechan to fix the pcode firmware. You might then be able to track down the changes needed to get to 2.4, but it will not be easy.Chris Newport wrote:I did some work on 2.4, so late versions should run in UP mode. SMP was still broken but bootable with kbd&mouse, serial console broken. The FC stuff is broken since the 2.2 to 2.4 transition, so you will have to use SCSI disks.2.4.32 appears to run OK unmodified with 8-way SMP on my sun4d (SPARCserver 1000E) over a serial tty although I've had a watchdog timeout, as expected Pluto doesn't work.
Others have since warned me not to boot from the FC interfaces, the OBP will overwrite the pcode with an old version, wrecking the above update. This might also happen if you probe-fc-all, so be warned that you may need to reapply the pcode fix.
I used 3 SCSI disks when I was working on this, with Solaris 8 for the pcode, 2.2 stable, and 2.4 tests.
This is an issue with all sparc32 systems, you need to be rather ruthless in pruning your kernel config and initrd. There have been calls to drop sparc32 from 2.6 for this reason, but some people have managed to make it work.Performance is significantly better than 2.2. I'm tempted to try getting Sarge onto the system but I don't know whether there is a prebuilt ISO and the tightest kernel I can build is very close to the maximum bootable.