Re: Seems I have bad timing with Debian on SPARC.
Hi Patrick,
Thanks for the informative reply! I was just slightly frustrated to
join in on something then realize it was on it's last leg.
Maybe I could even be of some help. I can't guarantee any time;
between my job and keeping my life and a very old house in one piece,
hobby time is pretty restricted (I'm sure this is common).
I will warn you all now, once I start writing, I pretty much don't stop. =p
I worked at several companies (Sun included) as a lab admin/manager
using UltraSPARC II and UltraSPARC III era gear. Specialized in fibre
channel (the early days of the Leadville stack were...interesting).
I'm pretty familiar on a system/storage/general level with most of
those systems, though the largest I had was a E4500 I stuck 5 of the
2-cpu boards in. Oldest was probably a SS1000 with 8xSuperSPARC @
80MHz if I remember correctly (been a while). Still have a field
engineer handbook around should I forget what jumper does what and
Oracle paywalls it. Like they did with the Toshiba firmware for the
dvd drive on a 420 I was using so I couldn't boot from a dvd.
The last time I was working with Linux on SPARC was with this same
system, doing software RAID over a QLA2100 to a Clariion DAE. Yeah,
at home. I eventually moved and purged or gave away all my SGI/Sun
stuff except for one Ultra 60 and one Xylogics Annex term server.
Managed to trade and/or wrangle my way up to dual 450s and 16x64MiB in
the Ultra 60, with two 36GB Cheetahs.
It's funny, I went searching for my problem getting X.org to load the
sunffb driver, and had to laugh because I saw a post from MYSELF about
a UPA/Creator3D bug on the LKML where I did a couple tests for Dave
Miller and Linus. My claim to fame is that I have an email from Linus
calling me an "Insane User" (direct quote). Very proud of that one.
Also could dox me pretty easy with that info.
The last time I had the machine running was a wild Gentoo build but
kept having SILO and my ext2 filesystem corrupting each other, and
mothballed it to make room for other things.
I never got far with a Blade 1000/2000 (Sun Fire 280R), I think the
I2C(sic?) was never supported (undocumented) so the fans always ran at
full blast, and there was that whole issue with firmware on the
embedded QLA2200 to deal with.
Every once in a great while, before I ripped the framebuffer out of
any used gear I got in (first thing I did to every machine...you'll
use the term server and like it!), I'd boot up a kernel to see 8 or so
of the penguins, heh.
Back to the current machine. It's up running Jessie; X.org starts up
on boot automatically in an unaccelerated framebuffer mode which is
pretty harsh, but it does come up. Went to run a browser to look for
an answer and that blew up with a bus error (unaligned address or
something). Started messing around, but couldn't get X -configure or
similar to even load the dumb framebuffer let alone sunffb drivers.
Went online on another machine trolling for samle X.org configuration
for Sun framebuffers...to no avail. Yeah, I found the ones Ferris
McCormick (RIP man) did way back at Gentoo, but those were almost a
decade old and no longer apply for the most part.
I built and saved this particular system as it seemed to be the most
popular type of machine out there, and had the best supported
hardware; the onboard symbios seemed in good shape, the Creator series
of cards were pretty ubiquitous, and nothing else out of the ordinary.
Didn't want to do much right out of storage though, red state
exceptions, failure to start up cpu2, memory failures at the first
offset into j7002 (first dimm...rather suspect). Stuff like that.
After reseating, cleaning, and percussive maintenance I got it to
complete a max-diag post with only the nvram dead and a couple
instances of CPU2 timeouts very early on (not sure what's up with that
so running uniprocessor occasionally). I could NOT find, and I am
very mad at myself for this, a damned 9-25 null. I swear I have one,
and just about any self-respecting hardware geek should have one.
25-25 null and 9-25 straight abound. Then, I remembered the Annex.
This Annex is an 8-port, with the twisted pair ethernet option (though
I still have an AUI transceiver if needed). Tried to figure out the
IP I had set (queue nmap, tcpdump, ethereal, so on), no go. Then I
remembered how to trigger diag mode, and thank science that there was
a custom cable in the box that went from their weird RJ45 pinout to a
DB25 female....crossed over for null!! So I got in, reset the IP,
connected the other cable I had made up for the Sun box to ttya and I
was off and running so to speak. T'was magical when I heard the CRT
degauss upon getting a signal and come online!
Then I had to look up how to purposefully bork the checksum on the
NVRAM so I could reprogram it with mkpl each time I turn on the box.
Got past that. Then after booting the Debian install CD, I get a
couple SILO notices, a fair amount of EXT2 superblock magic errors,
and I get into the installer! Then of course the CD-ROM device isn't
detected. So I screw around with that for hours, reading from
/dev/sr0 no problem, trying to mount manually....eventually, for
whatever reason, I got an Unaligned Transfer error in the syslog. Ah!
Possible faulty hardware. Miraculously, I had saved a spare SCSI-2
narrow CD-ROM drive that I could set for the proper block size.
Booted that and.....same error. OK, media is bad. Hmm, seems ok
elsewhere. Then I did the usual trick at that stage: find the most
ancient burner possible and try to write the disc at 1x. Best I could
do was 8x with a system at work, so I tried that, and the Unaligned
Transfer errors went away (I'm also using the mini iso so there's less
to read).
I *think*, and I'm really not positive, one of the things I tried long
ago was disabling the framebuffer console in the kernel and then was
able to load the X.org sunffb driver.
I should note that I am not a developer; I can hack out some shell
scripts and a bit of file operations in C if persuaded, but that's
about it. Didn't make it through college. That's a bit of a chip on
my shoulder to say the least. Anyhow.
If I take a break from some construction/painting this weekend I may
stop in....though the IRC channel on freenode looked abandoned.
Good to hear back!
u60spitfire
On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 6:02 PM, Patrick Baggett
<baggett.patrick@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 4:36 PM, u60 spitfire <u60spitfire@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Just signed up for this mailing list; had spent a good amount of time
>> over the last week getting my Ultra 60 up and running again. It's
>> mostly OK...heh...execpt the part about having to reprogram the darn
>> NVRAM every time I turn it on.
>>
>> I got jessie installed (Didn't get far in the stable release; first
>> thing I did was try to open iceweasel and it hit a bus error --
>> unaligned mem access maybe). Working on getting the framebuffer going
>> and whatnot now, went to the Debian forums and figured I'd try this
>> mailing list after no responses there.
>>
>> After checking the posts for the last few months (only a handful!),
>> they seem all about "Hello....anybody out there using/maintaining
>> this?" or "Hey if anyone's using driver X y'all need to maintain it
>> yourself 'cause you're the only one using it", heh.
>>
>
> Linux on SPARC is very niche. Think of yourself as...frontiersmen. Consider
> the cases though: you go to Oracle.com and cheap server is $20K. So you can
> either use:
>
> a) 100% supported Solaris 11.1, 24x7 phone support, deep virtual machine
> support, apps/libraries optimized for the HW, etc.
> b) Linux, which may or may not recognize your disk controller and may panic
> while booting the kernel on really new machines.
>
>>
>> So, realistically*, what's the deal? Any point in trying to get this
>> to work or should I cut my losses now and move to some other
>> distribution or OS? I had thought that maybe there was some interest
>> in the architecture since OpenSPARC was published/available for some
>> time. Anyhow.
>
>
> I think Debian/sparc is probably one of the better distributions for SPARC,
> but it can be quite rough, yeah. I run it and I don't have too many
> problems. I run it on an Ultra 80, E420R (Ultra 80 but with diff case IIRC)
> and a Blade 2500. Neither gives me problems, but running Sun-branded
> components is really hard -- Sun was never very forthcoming with HW specs
> and even if they had now, there would be little interest in pre-2000 HW to
> actually fix the drivers. You can try Solaris 10 if you have a lot of
> memory, but you're going to need to customize it, because for playing
> around, you probably don't need all of the stuff it installed.
>
> I personally enjoy Linux on SPARC more than Solaris on SPARC because I can
> mix cheap PC components in the PCI slots to get some flexibility, so long as
> it isn't critical for booting the system [e.g. disk controllers]. I ran an
> Ultra 10 with an NV GeForce4 for example and was able to play Quake III. Not
> all drivers work that well though, and I've filed a few bugs and other times
> just written off the driver as "meh" (for example, some SPARC sound drivers
> -- why bother if you can replace with $10 PCI sound card?)
>
> So I guess, I'd say stick with Debian. I think your experience with the
> Ultra 60 should be pretty decent overall, though if you need a new NVRAM
> battery, yeah, going to suck a bit. :)
>
> If you're having some issues, posted here, and I missed it, I'm sorry. I try
> to help when I can. Please let us know what they are and let's see if we
> can't work them out.
>
> Patrick
>
>>
>> Advice appreciated in advance.
>>
>> thanks
>>
>>
>>
>> *Yes, I'm not being terribly realistic running anything on this box to
>> begin with.
>>
>>
>> --
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