Aaro Koskinen wrote:
Hi, On Thu, Sep 11, 2014 at 09:41:09PM +0200, BERTRAND Joël wrote:BUT : for several months, Linux/Sparc64 is unfortunately not stable anymore (or completely broken). After 2.6.35 kernel, I can see random deadlock on all my sparc64 (sun4v _and_ sun4u). Now, I run NetBSD or Solaris 10. But FreeBSD and OpenBSD run fine also.I have Ultra 5 in active use. It used to suffer from random hard lockups/hangs, but those issues disappeared with recent Linux mainline kernels (I think after 3.12 or so).
I had a stack of Netras which I set up with Wheezy, can't remember the kernel version. One or more would predictably lock up shortly after 06:30 GMT Sunday, I suspect this was connected with logrotate rollover. I reverted to Lenny with a 2.6 kernel and they're rock-solid.
Over the last few months I've experimented with Wheezy from CD or local netboot, and have found it unusable: the developers urgently need to check that it works ab initio, rather than relying on "apt-get upgrade" or whatever. We've reverted to Solaris on a number of systems, and I'm working on contingency plans to move off SPARC entirely.
Apropos console cables: frankly, the serial console is one of the few remaining strong points of Sun systems. On systems which all have RJ45, you need a flat twist: i.e. 1-8, 2-7, 3-6 and so on; note that this is not the standard twisted Ethernet cable. To connect a machine with RJ45 to a PC, it's the same cable as a Cisco console port so refer to pinouts.ru. To connect a machine with an RJ45 to another Sun, you might need an additional twist or a null modem- check that.
-- Mark Morgan Lloyd markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk [Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]