Re: Current state of the Linux kernel on SPARC
Hi,
On Wed, 2025-08-27 at 16:35 -0400, Dennis Clarke wrote:
> Thank you for trying. I am a bit hesitant to buy an old S7-2 unit when
> I am unsure it can run anything.
The S7 certainly runs both Linux and the latest release of Solaris. There
just happen to be bugs that need to be worked on. If you run the first
Solaris CBE release, it should be fine and I hope Oracle will soon release
an update to CBE to address this problem.
As for Linux, Michael Karcher also actually found a bug in the M7 copy_{to,
from}_user code which might cause the crashes on S7, see:
https://github.com/karcherm/sparc-cfu-bug-reproducer/commit/62d36f0353bd523c143131b99bd9231116c1e054
> I already have a Fujitsu SPARC64 M3000 and that machine is crippled. It
> can not run anything other than Solaris 10[1]
These Fujitsu SPARC64 machines have always been very obscure and never really
useful outside their very specific usecase. SPARC hardware from Sun/Oracle
on the other hand supports a larger variety of operating systems.
> and I really did try Linux and NETBSD and even ORACLE Solaris 11.4
> on that hunk of metal. It may run some variant of Solaris 11.3 but that
> is locked away in the Oracle dungeon forever. I don't want it anyways.
There is no point in trying to run any non-Solaris operating system on these
Fujitsu machines as no one ever bothered to add support for these to Linux
or any of the BSDs. It has always been a lost cause, sorry.
> > > The installer uses the non-SMP kernel while the installed system uses the SMP
> > > kernel. Can you try whether the non-SMP kernel works?
> > >
>
> So it sounds like the S7-2 unit can in fact run something of the Linux
> variety. Somehow. A non-SMP kernel would not be worth the effort. This
> may all need to percolate a while before I try it out. Regardless it
> would be nice to have a decently quick SPARC unit running. Somewhere.
I'm very confident that we will get a stable Linux and Solaris 11.4
experience on the SPARC S7 in the near future. Don't worry.
Adrian
--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer
`. `' Physicist
`- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
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