Re: Anyone ever tried Debian on a Fujitsu/Oracle M3000 ?
Hi Betrand, Dennis,
On 13.05.22 17:32, BERTRAND Joël wrote:
Dennis Clarke a écrit :
Thus with 64G of ECC memory and four very expensive 15k rpm SAS disks
the thing is a brick. Or is it ?
Is there any reasonable way to :
[A] netboot Debian
[B] toss it on a scrap heap for re-cycle
Would love to hear any input from folks who have tried.
I haven't this kind of server, but some others Sparc64. OpenBSD and
NetBSD don't run on M3000. You can test FreeBSD that supported some
SPARC64, but...
@Bertrand:
Did you actually test OpenBSD on a M3000? Because from what can be read
at [1]:
```
Supported machines
[...]
* Fujitsu SPARC Enterprise M4000/M5000/M8000/M9000
[...]
OpenBSD 4.4 may trigger a hardware fault on the SPARC Enterprise
M4000/M5000/M8000/M9000 that can only be cleared by a field engineer. A
workaround for this problem is available in OpenBSD 4.5 and later.
[...]
Unsupported machines
[...]
* Fujitsu SPARC Enterprise M3000
* Sun SPARC Enterprise M3000
OpenBSD may trigger a hardware fault on the SPARC Enterprise M3000. With
older versions of the firmware, this fault can only be cleared by a
field engineer. Make sure you update the firmware before trying to run
OpenBSD on these machines. Firmware XCP 1116 and later are known to
allow end users to clear the fault themselves. There is no evidence that
running OpenBSD actually damages the hardware.
[...]
```
It actually sounds more like OpenBSD could work on a M3000 like on a
M4000 and up. And if a recent enough firmware is running, user's can
clear the possible fault - triggered by an ancient OpenBSD 4.4? -
themselves, if need be with modern OpenBSD versions.
I don't have one of these but would assume that the hardware
configuration (chipset, etc.) of M3000 and M4000 should be close enough
to expect to run the same OS.
[1]: http://www.openbsd.org/sparc64.html
UPDATE:
Ok, I did a search for M3000 and OpenBSD and stumbled upon this thread here:
https://sparc.openbsd.narkive.com/oKF6NMGJ/hardware-fault-on-m3000
It confirms that users can clear that fault with a recent enough
firmware - well, Mark Kettenis is also the maintainer of the sparc64
port of OpenBSD - but also states that the M3000 is different to M4000
and up in handling character output on the serial console. WTF?
So maybe using a graphics card and keyboard instead of the serial
console to boot this machine could make it work with OpenBSD? Just make
sure to never output anything on the serial console... :-)
****
For Linux on SPARC64 (on a PRIMEPOWER 250 with SPARC64 V+ actually) you
can see how that goes on [2]. GRUB runs there and Linux even starts to
boot (incl. printout of kernel messages) but leads to a "RED State
Exception" really fast. OpenBSD runs fine on them, though.
[2]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-sparc/2018/02/msg00074.html
Cheers,
Frank
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