UltraSparc IIIi kernel and virtualisation
Hi all,
Sun has donated a server to my FOSS project (www.officeshots.org). It
has an UltraSparc IIIi processor and 8 GB of RAM. Below is the output of
/proc/cpuinfo:
cpu : TI UltraSparc IIIi (Jalapeno)
fpu : UltraSparc IIIi integrated FPU
prom : OBP 4.22.19 2006/09/06 23:41
type : sun4u
ncpus probed : 4
ncpus active : 4
D$ parity tl1 : 0
I$ parity tl1 : 0
Cpu0ClkTck : 000000005ee3fe00
Cpu1ClkTck : 000000005ee3fe00
Cpu2ClkTck : 000000005ee3fe00
Cpu3ClkTck : 000000005ee3fe00
MMU Type : Cheetah+
State:
CPU0: online
CPU1: online
CPU2: online
CPU3: online
I have two questions about how to best use this machine. First off, do I
need an SMP kernel for this machine? cpuinfo only lists a single
processor, but it does mention "CPU0-3 online". Wikipedia says that this
processor is single-threaded.
My second question is what technology I can best use to run virtual
machines on this server. Many options are not available (like Xen or
VirtualBox) because they are for x86 only. Others like QEMU and
Linux-vserver are available but I don't know how well they would
perform. I've heared that QEMU is quite slow unless you use the KQEMU
kernel module and it looks like that's not available in sparc64.
The second question is also related to the first. At the moment this
machine runs Debian Lenny sparc64-smp. Aptitude has both SMP and non-SMP
kernels available but all the vserver enabled kernels are non-SMP.
Aptitude show sparc64, sparc64-smp and sparc64-vserver kernels but no
sparc64-smp-vserver kernel.
Any advice is greatly appreciated.
--
Sander Marechal
Lone Wolves Foundation
http://www.jejik.com
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