Re: Oracle Sun T5120 support getting better in debian 6.0.5 ?
Hi,
we installed Debian SPARC 6.0.3 on 20 Sun T5120 Enterprise nodes interconnected with infiniband cards and onboard network cards. The infiniband cards are very buggy and only work over IP. Problem is that there are no supported infiniband drivers for Linux/SPARC.
I recommend the Debian installation guide for SPARCs. We used the TFTP method, which worked fairly well. We ran into the same trouble as you when connecting a CDROM drive.
Only trick was that the image had to be named after the IP of the installation target, e.g. 192.168.0.2 -> C0.A8.00.02
We received these cluster nodes at no costs and we use them essentially for simulation codes/testing. As the tools are all SPARC and not SPARC64 we had some problems using OpenMP. For instance the atomic statement was very slow. After compiling gcc with arch=SPARC64 we had a considerable performance boost using OpenMP. In the end, all our development tools are now recompiled with arch=SPARC64.
Other than that, everything works flawlessly! NFS crashes after some weeks of uptime. Therefore we do a weekly reboot.
You will be able to log in to the ILOM SPs over SSH and eventually to your system console.
Oh and don't forget to recompile your kernel with 64 CPU support. Otherwise you will be stuck with 32 or something.
Michel
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