I just wanted to bring some attention to the experimental build of CentOS that Pasi put together for sparc64 architecture. I installed it for the first time last night on a Sun Ultra 5 (333MHz, 256MB RAM, upgraded to 40GB hard disk).
I installed it over a serial console as this is a headless system. Install went flawlessly. After the install was done and it booted up, I ssh'd in as root, and within 5 minutes had it participating in my LDAP/Kerberos/NFS environment. Logged out, logged back in with my regular user account with X11 forwarding enabled, and started firing up GUI apps.
The box is a little memory starved, and I think with 512MB it would be a lot better, but it is quite usable! App startup time is longer than what my Athlon64 3700+ has me accustomed to but once the apps are running, they are snappy & stable.
If you have an old 64 bit Sun workstation kicking around collecting dust, I think it would be worthwhile to try this build out and post your results to Pasi's centos-sparc mailing list. With any luck, maybe we can get to the point where this is an officially supported architecture.
Some apps are still missing, as is to be expected with a new architecture. Most notably, OpenOffice.org is not there. I did run firefox, gimp, thunderbird, and xchat flawlessly though. I can't comment at all on local X11 console support because my sun boxes run headless.
This is inspiring me to save up for a loaded Sun E420R or E450 to run at home and replace my Duron-based web/mail server.
On Wednesday 07 December 2005 09:15, Magnus Hedemark wrote:
This is inspiring me to save up for a loaded Sun E420R or E450 to run at home and replace my Duron-based web/mail server.
Whats your power bill like? :-D
But seriously now. I'd like to try it just for the geek factor somewhere - is there a supported hardware list somewhere? How about US-III based hardware?
Peter.
Peter Arremann wrote:
On Wednesday 07 December 2005 09:15, Magnus Hedemark wrote:
This is inspiring me to save up for a loaded Sun E420R or E450 to run at home and replace my Duron-based web/mail server.
Whats your power bill like? :-D
But seriously now. I'd like to try it just for the geek factor somewhere - is there a supported hardware list somewhere? How about US-III based hardware?
Yep, the E450 is definitely a great space heater. 8-) I have a friend who did some consulting for a defense contractor not long ago. They replaced a number of older E450's that were crunching simulation data. The replacements were about half the number of whitebox dual Opteron boxes running RHEL and he said there was a substantial performance increase as a result. Anyway, the reason I bring this up is that the initial reason for the upgrade wasn't to increase performance, but to ease up the load on power and cooling requirements in the datacenter in this particular location...which was accomplished mostly by retiring older Sun gear in favour of commodity PC equipment. Older Sun gear is dirt cheap on Ebay these days so if you need a heater for the winter.... 8-)
Cheers,
On Wednesday 07 December 2005 09:15, Magnus Hedemark wrote:
This is inspiring me to save up for a loaded Sun E420R or E450 to run at home and replace my Duron-based web/mail server.
Whats your power bill like? :-D
But seriously now. I'd like to try it just for the geek factor somewhere - is there a supported hardware list somewhere? How about US-III based hardware?
The beta doesn't support ESP controllers at this point, so E[3456][05]00 are out for now; I tried doing an HD install, but Anaconda threw a signal 11 (on hardware that is working fine under Aurora 2.0) before getting very far. As the CD is on the ESP, makes it a little difficult.
E10K and similar don't have Linux support.
Not sure about kernel support for US 3; I don't have anything newer than US II 400's here yet.
I installed it on an E450, but I think the E450 has some issues, as it didn't run long. Not sure if prelinking is turned on; prelinking needs to be set to default to OFF at least on Aurora 2.0 at this point, and I would think the same would apply for CentOS 4.2 SPARC unless Pasi has fixed the prelink problem.
Hardware available here for testing: E6500 (Im' actually loading it down with the 400MHz 4MB ecache CPU's; they'll only run at 360MHz on the 6500, but I have enough CPU's and boards to load it down to 26 CPU's for testing, albeit running at 336MHz due to the particular CPU/memory cards I have)(qlogic PTI to a D1000) E5500 (qlogic PTI to a D1000) E3500 (ESP hard disk there) E450 U30 U10 U5
While I have an E6000, not sure I'm going to power it up, as if I load the 6500 down with 26CPU's there won't be enough cards to populate more than 4 or 6 CPU's in the E6000, and the drive arrays on it are old and wierd.
Lamar Owen wrote:
On Wednesday 07 December 2005 09:15, Magnus Hedemark wrote:
This is inspiring me to save up for a loaded Sun E420R or E450 to run at home and replace my Duron-based web/mail server.
Whats your power bill like? :-D
But seriously now. I'd like to try it just for the geek factor somewhere - is there a supported hardware list somewhere? How about US-III based hardware?
The beta doesn't support ESP controllers at this point, so E[3456][05]00 are out for now; I tried doing an HD install, but Anaconda threw a signal 11 (on hardware that is working fine under Aurora 2.0) before getting very far. As the CD is on the ESP, makes it a little difficult.
E10K and similar don't have Linux support.
Not sure about kernel support for US 3; I don't have anything newer than US II 400's here yet.
I installed it on an E450, but I think the E450 has some issues, as it didn't run long. Not sure if prelinking is turned on; prelinking needs to be set to default to OFF at least on Aurora 2.0 at this point, and I would think the same would apply for CentOS 4.2 SPARC unless Pasi has fixed the prelink problem.
Hardware available here for testing: E6500 (Im' actually loading it down with the 400MHz 4MB ecache CPU's; they'll only run at 360MHz on the 6500, but I have enough CPU's and boards to load it down to 26 CPU's for testing, albeit running at 336MHz due to the particular CPU/memory cards I have)(qlogic PTI to a D1000) E5500 (qlogic PTI to a D1000) E3500 (ESP hard disk there) E450 U30 U10 U5
While I have an E6000, not sure I'm going to power it up, as if I load the 6500 down with 26CPU's there won't be enough cards to populate more than 4 or 6 CPU's in the E6000, and the drive arrays on it are old and wierd.
Just had to interject here... boy, that would be some piece of hardware to run the WRF or MM5 model on :-) Even at slower clock speeds, with an MPI or DM setup, that would be a screamer!
Sam
On Wednesday 07 December 2005 12:11, Lamar Owen wrote:
The beta doesn't support ESP controllers at this point, so E[3456][05]00 are out for now; I tried doing an HD install, but Anaconda threw a signal 11 (on hardware that is working fine under Aurora 2.0) before getting very far. As the CD is on the ESP, makes it a little difficult.
how about a isp@sbus ?
Not sure about kernel support for US 3; I don't have anything newer than US II 400's here yet.
Guess I'll download it and give it a try. Got a SB 1000 and a 2500 to test.
Thanks,
Peter.
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Chris Mauritz -
Lamar Owen -
Magnus Hedemark -
Peter Arremann -
Sam Drinkard