Sorry for the inline html. Leave it to a bad client. I'll see what I can do to minimize the noise till I can fix my mail system.
I wasn't sure when or where to offer my hat in the ring to do some testing etc and whatever else this needs to be done. But, such as it is.. yeah, I figured no harm trying.
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.
I have this big iron disease, yes.
To me this means we scrap the ancient museum pieces and get on with a reasonable Linux future on SPARC hardware.
I don't know, old Sun stuff like that from the purple era. There's a plan.
I'm very glad that we still have some useful people around.
> 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.
Yeah, my Sun work started when I was able to get a iPC going and I started experimenting with glorious Sun technology and the projects I was working on. Then I noticed you.
* * * 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.
Yeah I know. This is a very late run, fully optioned machine so at that point they were just starting the transition.
I have a big iron disease. Can't help it.
* * * You have it in a rack. * * *
It came to me as a single rack from a auction lot with a bunch of unknown units. I broke them down into a single fully configured system. All the memory, disks, IO, etc. I now have access to more PCI slots than even a sane person would care to. The other systems I've been putting together pieces of over a decade or more. I missed out by a day on the E10K that they had.. sadness.
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.
Most everything has Solaris on it. But, it would be nice to see at least 1 with Debian on it. I'd like to see if maybe I can somehow make that happen even if it's just testing.
> 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.
This is what I would naturally expect. I'm okay with that.
> 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
Fine with me. I'll eventually port my 64 bit OS to SPARC. Everyone else can just get inline. We know stuff slowly rolls down from this point. That's great. I like that.
> 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.
I have more plans for that too in this particular space but a completely separate discussion.
>
> 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.
Well, Dennis..
I haven't done a large amount of work since my day's making shareware in the early 90s => mid 90s and the other random open source work I've done that got barely noticed and my random projects. That's where most people from that era would know me from, except by now some of its buried in the noise of the internet.. maybe the wayback machine.. If you need to know, you can get to me easily.
I've been following your work since a few years after it started..
Now that I have slowly been getting more time, I can definitely devote some significant time to things that matter. And if there's one thing that anyone should about me is that I enjoy things that matter.
--
--
Dennis Clarke
RISC-V/SPARC/PPC/ARM/CISC
UNIX and Linux spoken
Glad someone does..
Thanks,
Gregory Bowne