[CentOS] Sparc?

John R Pierce pierce at hogranch.com
Tue Dec 29 23:11:51 UTC 2009


Slack-Moehrle wrote:
> My 12 year old wants to learn more about servers and has memorized a lot of commands like ls, chmod, du, etc.
> He wants to have his own domain and server on the web and I have enough Static IP's, so why not foster this interest. 
>
> I have an old ultra sparc 5. Are there any CentOS versions that support Sparc? 

the Ultra 5 (and its cousin the Ultra 10) is penalized by having a 
programmed IO IDE channel which can transfer a max 6MB/sec at 100% CPU 
bound.

some technical details here,
http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub/validateUser.do?target=Systems/U5/U5&source= 
<http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub/validateUser.do?target=Systems/U5/U5&source=>

Its supported by Solaris 10 but with a max of 512MB ram, you're not 
going to get very far with ZFS.

best thing you can do with those is get a LSI Logic/Symbios SCSI card 
(gotta be 5V 33Mhz 32bit PCI card such as the 53C875 or '876), and use a 
SCSI disk, this gets away from the PIO performance bottleneck, and 
should be supported by the openboot rom as-is.   if you remove the 
floppy drive, you can get two HD's into a U5 chassis.





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