Re: New test kernel - second attempt
On 9/15/25 16:43, Greg Bowne wrote:
Howdy, everyone.
I've been following thanks to Dennis Clarke and though I might be of some
help while I don't consider myself an expert I will surely test.
I've got a small bunch of Sun and SPARC64 stuff, as well as sun4u, sun4v,
Snoracle/Fujitsu M4000
Sun Fire v440
Sun Fire v880
Sun Fire v490 (still in the box)
Sun Fire e4900
Sun Fire v40z
Sun Fire v120
Sun Ultra 10
We have been discussing this and we also have the non-stop 24-hour a
day endless IRC ( #blastwave chan on Libera ) wherein the banter never
stops. I think my proposal was that we ( a small collection of super
geeks and nerds ) gather up hardware that makes modern sense. Modern.
To me this means we scrap the ancient museum pieces and get on with a
reasonable Linux future on SPARC hardware.
The really heavy lifting has been done by John Paul Adrian Glaubitz :
https://people.debian.org/~glaubitz/sparc64/
I used to have Sun iPC and iPX 20-25 years ago.
We both have decades of sparc history. History is the key word there.
* * * H I S T O R Y * * *
So the old old UltraSPARC hardware is just museum junk now. Leave it
running Solaris 2.5.1 or maybe Solaris 8. I have a Sun SPARCStation 20
running Solaris 8 and even one with Solaris 2.5.1 running. Thanks to
Matthew ( we know him ) there is even the Intel i486 co-processor in
there. We both have Fujitsu hardware. The *only* machine that makes any
damn sense to look at is the M4000 and upwards. You did list that above
as Snoracle but we both know it is really Fujitsu with ORACLE stuck on
the label.
* * * You have it in a rack. * * *
I think ( if memory serves ) that machines firmware is not borked at
the factory. The M3000 unit is borked and useless museum piece trash.
It can not boot anything except Solaris 10 or a borkified Solaris 11.3
that is not available. Everything else will panic and halt the trash
machine. It runs Solaris 10 fine. I shut it down yesterday after a final
backup. Moving onwards.
I wouldn't mind testing the Debian kernel.
To be honest, I've been sort of waiting on linux of some sort getting some
work on Sun systems.
Get in line! Line forms behind John Paul Adrian Glaubitz ( JPAG ) and
with a bit of luck we may get Matthew in the line also.
If its Debian, great because I have been using Debian and Debian based
distros for years.
Well if a small collection of folks can get it running smoothly and load
tested then we know it will flow outwards from Debian. That is the way
of things. Forget RED Hat. Just forget them. They have IBM POWER and
their mainframes to worry about. Also Debian runs fine on POWER9 :
dax$ neofetch
_,met$$$$$gg. dclarke@dax
,g$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$P. -----------
,g$$P" """Y$$.". OS: Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm) ppc64le
,$$P' `$$$. Host: 9006-22P
',$$P ,ggs. `$$b: Kernel: 6.1.140-mrw1
`d$$' ,$P"' . $$$ Uptime: 98 days, 23 hours, 26 mins
$$P d$' , $$P Packages: 1313 (dpkg)
$$: $$. - ,d$$' Shell: bash 5.2.15
$$; Y$b._ _,d$P' Terminal: /dev/pts/2
Y$$. `.`"Y$$$$P"' CPU: POWER9 (128) @ 3.800GHz
`$$b "-.__ GPU: ASPEED Technology, Inc. ASPEED
Graphics Family
`Y$$ Memory: 167641MiB / 261522MiB
`Y$$.
`$$b.
`Y$$b.
`"Y$b._
`"""
So lets just stay on modern sparc please.
I can do C and Assembly and C++, if it needs any work or debugging.
Although I'm primarily a hobbyist OS Developer and driver developer.
Wasn't sure exactly where to throw my hat in the ring to do that but
here it is, I guess.
Thanks,
Gregory Bowne
I have seen your hat for at least a few years now man. You know it.
--
--
Dennis Clarke
RISC-V/SPARC/PPC/ARM/CISC
UNIX and Linux spoken
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