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Re: Current state of the Linux kernel on SPARC

I was actually part of the Oracle team that helped port Oracle Linux 6 (OL6) to sparc64 (for T5120, T5140, T3, T4, T5).  OL6 also supported creating/managing ldoms as well, much like Solaris. Although I don't currently work for Oracle, I still have an interest in helping with various architectures (including sparc64, power be/le, arm64, x86, etc).  I would definitely enjoy working on this again in a full-time capacity, if given an opportunity to do so.
Regarding sparc64, I have T5120, T5140, and Oracle S7-2 systems.  Last time I checked, many months ago Gentoo and Debian both worked on Oracle S7-2. 

Regarding Gentoo:
During the initial bare-metal install on S7-2, it worked but couldn't use my ConnectX4-LX NIC.  I was blocked from continuing the install.  Asked the Gentoo sparc team to enable support for ConnectX-4 LX and ConnextX-5 based Network Cards.  They also updated their ISO images to reflect it.  I confirmed it worked. 

Regarding Debian:
It worked on S7-2, but can't say it was 100% stable (especially after updating packages). The initial bare-metal install was okay, but not very stable after updates (panics, etc).   When I have time, I will try the latest debian ports ISO to see if things are better (stability/update wise) on sparc64 (for S7-2 and T5140) and IBM Power7/8.
PS - Managed to get XRDP to build/install on Solaris 11.4 for remote desktop.   Also, just a heads-up, Solaris 11.4 (CBE 11.4.81) doesn't install bare-metal on Oracle S7-2.  It is a bug, hopefully the next CBE release will resolve that issue.  https://www.oracle.com/solaris/solaris11/downloads/solaris-downloads.html   Was planning to use CBE 11.4.81 to create ldoms, I had to use an earlier version of Solaris 11.4 ISO to work around the bare-metal installation problem. 


Regards,

Tony Rodriguez


On 8/26/25 10:49 AM, Dennis Clarke wrote:

On 8/24/25 17:09, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:

Hello,
since there has been a lot of recent activity around the Linux kernel on SPARC and there are also a lot of issues to be dealt with and unmerged patches, I have decided to summarize the current state of the Linux kernel on SPARC to bring 
anyone interested up to date.




    Thank you very much for this detailed update. I have had a SPARC
server ( or two or seven ) running somewhere but the problems are, how
may I say it? The problems are always numerous. It is just a real pain
to keep one of those running much of anything anymore. Your detailed
update gives me the notion that a decently fast machine may exist that
will run Linux in a reasonable fashion. Maybe. This could just be yet
another total waste of time and money. That is the nature of Linux on
SPARC these days.

    Having said all of that I wonder if anyone has run Linux on the more
recently built ORACLE S7-2 type servers? I think the people at Oracle
may have released a variant of ORACLE Linux ( read that as Red Hat ) for
SPARC just for this machine. However the code changes required for that
to work may be locked away on Larry's island. Who knows.

    So has anyone managed to get Linux running on the S7-2 type unit?
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