Re: Current state of the Linux kernel on SPARC
On 8/27/25 18:19, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
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.
It seems like a bit of a risk in the neighbourhood of $1800 Canadian
Beaver skins[1] just to try that. I will wait until we hear from an
expert such as Tony Rodriguez on the experiment.
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 had access to an M7 only for a brief moment in life and that moment is
long gone. I think I have some test data saved somewhere. I was running
Solaris of course and it was a very large ( for the year ) machine. Yes
it was impressive and yes it was likely just another business failure.
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.
Actually my M4000 and M3000 are both clearly labeled as ORACLE hardware.
Yes we all know that Fujitsu was the place of origin. Only the M4000
seems to be able to boot anything other than Solaris however it is a bit
of a beast to have at home. Such a machine needs a hydralic lift to get
it into a rack. Then it is *very* expensive to keep running with limited
return on investment. Yet another fine machine for the year it was made
but no longer practical at all.
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.
I made the discovery that even Solaris 11.4 will cause the CPU to panic
in early boot. This is by design. Not an accident.
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.
I shall await the good words from Tony Rodriguez.
--
--
Dennis Clarke
RISC-V/SPARC/PPC/ARM/CISC
UNIX and Linux spoken
[1] my days of doing great open source work are long behind me :
https://www.gnu.org/people/people.html#d
Long gone are the days of pushing out half a terabyte daily of ready
to run packages into the commercial Solaris market. The OpenSolaris
project gave us ZFS and then died a horrific sudden cardiac arrest
when Larry pulled the plug in the middle of the night.
These days I need to protect my very limited Canadian Beaver skins.
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