This report/issue is geared to those attempting to find a CentOS/RH for Sparc.
Currently, there is a slowdown to the development of CentOS for the Sparc platform. The current tftp64.img build for CentOS on Sparc does not have support for the low-cost Netra and Sunfire 1U servers, thus hinders any chance of this distro release being used for cheap hardware re-provisioning needs (i.e. basic web servers, database servers, etc).
In the past, there was a project called Aurora Sparc Linux, which was based on the Fedora platform. There are older builds still available, but these are rather ancient in comparison to today's kernel and driver updates.
Upon doing a bit of in-depth research, I did discover that Ubuntu did release a Sparc build under their v7.10 distro, which supports many older as well as new Sparc-based platforms including the low-cost Netra and Sunfire 1U servers. These special servers require the 'eri' driver commonly called the SunGEM driver.
I did, however, stumble upon a 'Fedora Secondary' project which does have actual images and CD/DVD/NetBoot ISO builds available and is based on the Fedora 9 distro.
http://archives.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora-secondary/releases/test/9-B eta/Fedora/sparc/iso/
Upon initial testing, I found that the test ISO and the TFTP images do support the low-cost Netra and Sunfire 1U servers as well as other platform, but there seems to be an issue when it comes down to creating the actual disk environment. Out of five tries, three of them tried to create an 'ext2' disk build-out even when ext3 was specified. The remaining two would place the disks in a read-only status -- and even using a rescue boot CD -- failed to restore these to a read-write capability.
I recommend to those looking at trying out a RedHat-based distro for Sparc, to look at this build. It might provide some guidance for the CentOS development team going forward for future platform releases.
-- Michael
On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 1:40 PM, Worsham, Michael < michael.worsham@morris.com> wrote:
This report/issue is geared to those attempting to find a CentOS/RH for Sparc.
I have recently installed the Sparc Beta EL5 build. I have a pair of Ultra80's to play with here...Granted Im new to the Sparc side but so far its not too much different from x86 just minor differences/quirks with a few SRPMS .
Currently, there is a slowdown to the development of CentOS for the Sparc platform. The current tftp64.img build for CentOS on Sparc does not have support for the low-cost Netra and Sunfire 1U servers, thus hinders any chance of this distro release being used for cheap hardware re-provisioning needs (i.e. basic web servers, database servers, etc).
I would like to contribute to this development of CentOS for Sparc. I asked last week looking for SRPMS to the beta build at http://sparc.centos.org/os/ . Ive had luck using the --changelog and finding the changes off the corona aurora builds or the SPARC Fedora Builds.
Do you know what support is missing? Just curious.
Im guessing this is you http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=3061 See below....
Upon doing a bit of in-depth research, I did discover that Ubuntu did release a Sparc build under their v7.10 distro, which supports many older as well as new Sparc-based platforms including the low-cost Netra and Sunfire 1U servers. These special servers require the 'eri' driver commonly called the SunGEM driver.
Im wondering if there is some other issue.. I see the sungem is included in EL5. This is the default sparc64 kernel..
ls -la /lib/modules/2.6.18-53.c5sparc/kernel/drivers/net/sungem* -rwxr--r-- 1 root root 48576 Mar 10 2008 /lib/modules/2.6.18-53.c5sparc/kernel/drivers/net/sungem.ko -rwxr--r-- 1 root root 20888 Mar 10 2008 /lib/modules/2.6.18-53.c5sparc/kernel/drivers/net/sungem_phy.ko
And this is driver on the bootiso....
strings sungem.ko | egrep "sungem.c|vermagic" drivers/net/sungem.c vermagic=2.6.18-53.c5sparc SMP mod_unload gcc-4.1 sungem.c:v0.98 8/24/03 David S. Miller (davem@redhat.com)
David
Hi Guys,
d b wrote:
I would like to contribute to this development of CentOS for Sparc.
There is some interest in getting together some groups for the Sparc builds as well as the s390(x) builds. Give me a few days to get the existing urgent stuff out of the way, then we can have a meeting on irc and workout whats the best way to move forward.
I'd imagine one or two people taking up the reins for the project ( sub-project ? SIG ? ), setup a SCM + Trac instance and get a buildsystem in place to play with.
w.r.t Sparc - I also have 3 machines online 24/7 ( Netra's ) that could potentially be the buildsystem / playgrounds.
- KB
On Monday 30 March 2009 21:11:51 Karanbir Singh wrote:
w.r.t Sparc - I also have 3 machines online 24/7 ( Netra's ) that could potentially be the buildsystem / playgrounds.
I have a pair of Enterprise servers that could be pressed into the service. One is an E6500 with 14 CPU's and about 14GB of RAM; the other has I think 8 CPU's and 6 or 7 GB of RAM. They've been powered down for some time, but I did run a corona update from Aurora Linux on them a while back.
Remote console is possible. Both have a D1000 array with the diff SCSI controllers (isp); one has a disk board with two 36G drives on the esp controller.
-
d b -
Karanbir Singh -
Lamar Owen -
Worsham, Michael