[CentOS] Sparc?

Tue Dec 29 23:39:29 UTC 2009
Peter A <loony at loonybin.org>

On Tuesday 29 December 2009 18:11:51 John R Pierce wrote:
> 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&s
> ource=
>  <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.

That's a good suggestion, even old scsi drives are much faster than the ide 
disks and controller used in the Ultra5. Unfortunately we had some issues 
running two 7200rpm SCSI disks in a U5 - the poor little box would overheat. 

Peter.


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