Hi,
yes, I resumed work a few weeks ago. X11: problem solved(!) And weather SPARC is dead or not, I still have 18 SPARC boxes here in my room. Fully equipped with all existing frame buffers that ever existed (except XVR-200, XVR-300, XVR-1000 and XVR-1200 at this time, because I had sold them). I also have a T1000 now with PCIe x1 to x16 Adapter. Although this box has not even USB and only a single narrow PCEe slot, I could test the XVR-2500 that way. And OBP detects it as boot-console, although the T1000 was never intended to run in a non-headless configuration On SPARC I no longer fiddle with libdevinfo, libpciaccess and Xorg (weather libpciaccess based or old xserver 1.2), but instead I focussed on getting Xsun to function, which Alan Coopersmith has thankfully opensourced 2 years ago in his spare time, just in the first, last and probably only ever moment it was possible (BIG THANKS!). BTW: If you visit Oracle's site, SPARC is still quite well and kicking. http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/servers/sparc-enterprise/t-series/sparc-t4-processor-ds-497205.pdf Or which other vendor can offer a comparable CPU with up to 64 threads running at up to 3.0GHz? Letting alone the low power consumption per cycle. My only problem with Illumos as code-base is, that much stuff belonging to legacy SPARC hardware (which includes all workstations) seems to have been dropped from Illumos.At least that was my first impression a month ago. And for this reason I based my initial version of SPARC-OpenIndiana on Nevada 125 for the first demo release. That way I intend to convince folks, that we should merge in the missing platform specific pieces. But one step after another. After I had promised things in the past, this time I did not want to make _any_ public announcement, until the SPARC-OI demo iso is ready for download. Now that you started such a thread, staying silent was no longer an option. Yeas, there will be SPARC-OI. My personal goal is and always has been, that we can offer a functioning X-Windows. So it shouldn't be a server-only release, limited to serial console/RSC/Alom. And thanks to Alan's openXsun open-sourcing contribution, this dream has *finally* come true. The code can be found at http://dlc.sun.com/osol/x/downloads/openXsun/openXsun.tar.bz2 and is a stripped cut-down version. But meanwhile I added some missing functions to build/link it sucessfully. Plus it even functions now on my test machines (U1/U2/U5/U10/U30/U60/U80/SB100/SB150/SB1000/SB1500R/SB1500S/SB2000/SB2500R/SB2500S/Tadpole SPARCle/T1000). It only took a few days and was a child's game when compared to what is required to modify libdevinfo/libpciaccess/Xorg to get only a small number of frame buffers working, with instabilities, minute-long PCI-scanning delays, crashes and bus errors. openXsun works now with my additions and it is a heaven's gift. Please give me 4 weeks for the preliminary SPARC-OI release. Everything incl. of course the src modifications will be released. Thanks for your patience, regards, Martin On Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 4:51 PM, Jim Klimov <jimkli...@cos.ru> wrote: > Hello all, > > There are some discussions about whether illumos on SPARC is > a dead-end or not (i.e. whether it is stupid to buy HW systems > from the one vendor and not buy their software support, or if > there is more than one vendor, or if anyone would pick up the > open-sourced processor designs for the Niagaras and build some > cool appliances or servers). So, just for the anecdotal sake, > I wanted to share this weekend's experience about OpenSolaris > on SPARC - and how it saved the day. > > While it may seem unlikely at this moment that new SPARC > systems would be rolled out for OI to get installed on them, > there are many already-deployed reliable boxes which would > run obsolete (or our new) software "until they fscking die". > > I was asked to look at a T2000 with Sol 10u8 which did just > that: it died during what could have been fsck - if ZFS had > one. Apparently, the system's users did nothing formally > invalid, they were just zfs-sending and zfs-receiving some > datasets within the pool in order to recompress older data > with gzip-9, then they tried to destroy the older dataset > tree and rename the compressed copy to take its place. > Something went wrong, the pool locked up with no IOs taking > place (according to iostat). The "zfs" commands all hung, > however "zpool status" and friends did not. Filesystem > operations also went well, so running zones were properly > stopped and the box was ultimately rebooted. It did not > come back up. > > Luckily, there was a Solaris installation server in > that network, so it took a few minutes to prepare a LAN > installation resource from a stashed SXCE snv_129_sparc > image, and boot the T2000 from the network, into single > user mode. OpenSolaris found nothing suspicious about > the data pool and the rpool, imported and exported them > without complaints. While at the rpool, we deleted the > /etc/zfs/zpool.cache file to allow the system to boot > its Solaris 10. It booted, but also hung at subsequent > "zpool import -R / pool" request - in the same way: > no iostat operations to report, and no errors in the > logs... > > Back to the networked boot of OpenSolaris, where we > imported the data pool, destroyed the remaining old > uncompressed datasets and completed the renaming of > compressed datasets to take place of those ones, > transparently to the zones and other consumers. > This did unclog something, so the Solaris 10 image > did afterwards quickly import the pool and happily > uses it today. > > Yesterday the old OpenSolaris SXCE for SPARC did > save the day. I can easily imagine hitting some bugs > in ZFS that were fixed after the last SXCE release, > where a hypothetical "OpenIndiana for SPARC" image > would be able to save us - even if it is not (yet) > used as the everyday OS for the box. > > Hope this story entertains someone and helps others, > //Jim Klimov > > > > _______________________________________________ > OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list > OpenIndiana-discuss@openindiana.org > http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss _______________________________________________ OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list OpenIndiana-discuss@openindiana.org http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss