I have here an SS20 which has run Woody reliably for an extended period. It has 2x Ross 625 CPUs, PROM 2.25R and 256Mb RAM.
It runs single-processor 2.4.27 from Sarge reliably, but attempting to boot SMP gives an interrupt 15/watchdog error. If it is given this sequence of commands: reset ross625 ibuf-off 2 switch-cpu ibuf-off 0 switch-cpu boot it will boot into SMP, but eventually fails with a "wrong magic" error. If the Ross modules are replaced by Suns then it will boot either single processor or SMP successfully, and run reliably. Reverting to Ross modules, if I build a standalone kernel I find it's too large to boot from disc, but I can boot it over the LAN (boot net root=/dev/sda2) and the system runs SMP reliably. However I notice that while the BogoMIPS rating of a single CPU is 150 when running SMP it's dropped to 104 per processor- I thought this was calibrated using a tight loop? I'm assuming that none of the core developers will be looking at this because of the age of the hardware, and I don't have the hardware information to even start making sense of this sort of problem. However as a workaround can anybody point me at the documentation that describes the Debian/SPARC-specific kernel rebuild procedure- running the standard "make vmlinux" gives me a kernel image of around 2Mb. My position is that I'm keen on promoting Sun kit for in-house use, but having to boot over the LAN makes it difficult to argue that they are a viable alternative to PCs, and if I'm not confident making that argument I'm not going to put my neck on the block and ask for money for newer systems. -- Mark Morgan Lloyd markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk [Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
