[CentOS] Re: Hot swap CPU

[alex at milivojevic.org]

Quoting Johnny Hughes <mailing-lists at hughesjr.com>:

> On Sat, 2005-07-02 at 14:35 -0500, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
>> On Sat, 2005-07-02 at 15:22 -0400, Lamar Owen wrote:
>> > And discussing them would be more on-topic if there were a CentOS/SPARC64,
>> > which would be nice to no end.
>
> Believe it or not ... there is a plan for a future SPARC distro for
> CentOS.  It is only in the planning stages now :)

And that would be very nice to have.  Currently, I'm aware of only two 
"working"
sparc64 distros:

Debian.  It works and installs more or less nicely.  There are some gotchas to
get it installed (if one wants 2.6 kernels and more recent versions of
packages), so not really for total beginers.

Aurora.  Rebuild of Fedora Core.  It is lagging in release cycles 
behind Fedora.
I believe currently they are still at FC2 stage, no installer for current
version.  One needs to install version 1.0 (rebuild of Red Hat 7.3) and than
use yum to upgrade to 1.92 (rebuild of FC2).

With both of them I remember having trouble setting up mirroring + LVM at
install time, and both of them had some odd trouble with disc geometry and
partitioning (with my SCSI controller and discs), and my hme ethernet card
would freeze occasionally.  And I vaugly remember having some issues with
Native Posix Thread Library, but couldn't remember which one was it 
and/or what
it was about (at about the same time I was experimenting with OpenBSD on that
box, got mirroring running, hme was working flawlessly, so I left it that way
until the power supply in box died).  So you might want to watch about those.

My guess is that you'll be doing only sparc64 distribution, and not 
sparc32?  I
remember reading somewhere that 2.6 kernel was not fully ported to 
sparc32 (and
it was uncertain if it will be ever fully ported), but that might be 
old news. So I guess it will be combination of 64-bit kernel and mixed 
32/64-bit
userland?

While we are at that, is AXP port fully 64-bit (like OpenVMS and/or Digital
UNIX), or you use 32/64-bit mix model (as most other 64-bit operating systems
on most other 64-bit processors)?

I hope you'll be able to get Anaconda installer working with full set of
configuration options as in x86 version (this is the single main show killer
for Aurora and/or all other ports of Linux distributions to non-Intel
architectures).

P.S.
For Richey.  Linux kernel doesn't run on PDP-11, but there is a port 
for VAX. Only 2.4 kernel currently, don't know if any work was done on 
2.6 kernel,
limited hardware support, legendary VAX 11/780 (1 VAX MIPS is the speed 
of that
machine, and when people quote "MIPS" numbers, they usually mean VAX MIPS even
nowdays) not supported unfortunately.  That is the closest "to the Unix
origins" that Linux ever got ;-)

So my guess is that it might be possible to port CentOS 3 to VAX.  Not that I
know of anybody who would reinstall their VAX to try it out.  The rare sites
that still have them (for running legacy apps tied to the VAX) mostly run VMS,
Ultrix or some flavour of BSD on them and don't touch 'em.  And as soon as
legacy applications are replaced, it usually means the end of the life for VAX
on that site.  The AXP port is something that might interest many more people
in next few years to come (and maybe even after that, if miracle happens and
somebody starts some serious development on that line of processors again).

BTW, while we are still at usability of old hardware, I know for sure 
(I visited
the site and saw them personally) that a redundant pair of PDP-11 machines was
controlling the electricity distribution system of one mid-sized European
country as far as late 90's, maybe even into the 2000's (and they never had
blackouts like you guys down in US get occasionally).  Not sure if they
replaced them in more recent years.  That would be classic example of legacy
applications where you would would find such old systems still used.  Not much
processing power required, but system must be rock-solid stable and 
reliable. Of course, to be fair, down in US you have couple of big 
cities with population
(city and its metropolitan area) in the order of average mid-sized European
country ;-)

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