Re: non-wintel hardware choices

[Karel Gardas]

On Fri, May 6, 2016 at 6:15 AM, Tinker  wrote:
> There's the Fujitsu Sparc M10 line,
> http://www.fujitsu.com/global/products/computing/servers/unix/sparc/ , and
> Oracle Sparc T7 , https://www.oracle.com/servers/sparc/t7-1/index.html .
>
> This was what you meant right?

The prices on those boxes are unfortunately from completely different
space so I'm afraid nobody from OpenBSD devs/users ever seen such
machine nor was able to even boot OpenBSD on it. Pity, as SPARC64 was
really nice.

The crush of SPARC64 is written on wall, see a load of really cheap
M4000 boxes on Ebay. I've even started to see very cheap M3000 which
was not usual at all during few last years as they were the only
possible engineering "workstation" for last years. Sigh.

Anyway, as others pointed out, ARM is the way to go for non-Intel/AMD
hardware and in the future perhaps ARM64...

Re: non-wintel hardware choices

[Bryan C. Everly]

Michael,

The challenge is device drivers for the video cards.  Especially in
the PA-RISC case because there really is no documentation for them.
I've spent some time on the HP end of things and unfortunately was in
over my head pretty quickly.

Thanks,
Bryan


On Fri, May 6, 2016 at 10:54 AM, Michael Lambert  wrote:
>> On 5 May 2016, at 19:52, Bryan Everly  wrote:
>>
>> Unfortunately PA-RISC doesn't have X support at the console. You can
>> run X on it and have the Windows render on a SPARC, MIPS or Intel
>> platform though.
>
> Neither does Alpha (AXP).  Does anyone know if there are blockers in building
> xenocara on these platforms or there just isn't enough interest for anyone to
> try seriously?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Michael

Re: non-wintel hardware choices

[Michael Lambert]

> On 5 May 2016, at 19:52, Bryan Everly  wrote:
>
> Unfortunately PA-RISC doesn't have X support at the console. You can
> run X on it and have the Windows render on a SPARC, MIPS or Intel
> platform though.

Neither does Alpha (AXP).  Does anyone know if there are blockers in building
xenocara on these platforms or there just isn't enough interest for anyone to
try seriously?

Thanks,

Michael

Re: non-wintel hardware choices

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi,

Bryan Everly wrote:

Unfortunately PA-RISC doesn't have X support at the console. You can
run X on it and have the Windows render on a SPARC, MIPS or Intel
platform though.


sorry, didn't know that. I always did run my HP hardware headless... so 
I never noticed.
I always liked the CPU since University... I am sad that it morphed into 
Itanic and now drowns to oblivion.


Riccardo

Re: non-wintel hardware choices

[Predrag Punosevac]

Riccardo Mottola wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Gregory Edigarov wrote:
> > if I want to build a non-wintel system with commodity running OpenBSD 
> > without problems, what are my options?

The only live architectures besides AMD64 are ARM and MIPS64 routers. I
have also heard of RISC-V and OpenRISK but have never seen the hardware
in real life.

OpenBSD supports MIPS64 router hardware via octeon port

http://www.openbsd.org/octeon.html

Please see caveats by searching this mailing list for example for
EdgeRouter LITE.

ARM-based devices, such as BeagleBone, BeagleBoard, PandaBoard ES, SABRE
Lite, Nitrogen6x and Wandboard will be supported by armv7 port. 

http://www.openbsd.org/armv7.html

Presumably Bitrig fork of OpenBSD has somewhat better support at the
moment for ARM based devices.



> > preferably something non-apple also, which i will be able to connect 
> > display, mouse, and keyboard, and hopefully run X, etc. 

Apple uses Intel hardware for a long time :)

> 
> since we don't have Raspberry support, then your choice for reasonable 

Who are we? Raspberry PI is a pile of proprietary firmware. 

> (albeit almost all obsolete) platform restricts to ultra-sparc (old 
> sparcs are fun, but slow by any means and also the CPU support is for 
> OpenBSD hit and miss... 2 of my SparcStations are unstable), PPC (some 

Sparc (old 32-bit SUN hardware from late 80s), Sparc64, sgi, alpha,
macppc are all vintage architectures. You apparently never run OpenBSD
on Sparc64 hardware since otherwise you would know that OpenBSD support
for Sparc64 was only second to Solaris. OpenBSD is the only operating
system other than Solaris which support UltraSPARC IV/T1/T2 and Fujitsu
SPARC64-V/VI/VII chip-sets. That was the favorite hardware of OpenBSD
developers before it died circa 2004. Sun Blade 2500 gray was the last
and the greatest. I gave mine to somebody last Summer. Too much noise
and electricity. It was not worthy for a guy who doesn't make living by
writing a code (Nice Big-endian machine). 

> Amiga boards, older Macs) and... nothing else. PA-RISC is fun, but I 
> never tried X there.
> And, if you think, the only other machines that could do are Itanium and
> 
> Alpha.
> 

Amiga :) Dude we are talking some late 80s stuff here when I was young. 

> 
> For most of these, you will notice that base OpenBSD stuff works pretty 
> well (as does NetBSD and to a lesser degree Linux) but several bigger 
> application prove quite buggy! Browsers, mail clients.. everything is 
> tested on i386/amd64 only.


NetBSD Sparc64 port was in the sorry state comparing to OpenBSD. On the
top of it NetBSD has been relaying on the cross compiling for a long,
long time. At this point one has to wonder whether NetBSD can really run
on anything else than amd64. Last time I looked they didn't have native
software package builds for anything else than amd64. On the top of it
all last year during the series of interviews with OpenBSD and NetBSD
conducted by a Polish guy the most revealing thing was that not a single
NetBSD guy used NetBSD at work and even worse most guys run NetBSD only
in the virtual environment on their private hardware. In sharp contrast
all OpenBSD developers who were interviewed run large OpenBSD
deployments at work and used OpenBSD as the only OS on their private
hardware (you have to eat your own dog food).



> SPARC and PPC seem to me more crashy when bad programming happens, which
> 
> is actually a good thing and a reason to keep computing diversity alive.
> 
> But I fear it will become worse, the only thing that has a chance is ARM
> 
> which is used little-endian. Or embedded PPC, which is used also LE. Big
> 
> Endian will perhaps not even taught at school in 10+ years.
> 
> On Linux I have Firefox running on PPC, but I read that others have 
> issues with it on non-intel. Be prepared to find more bugs than usual.
> We at GNUstep take quite some care that things work on PPC, SPARC and 
> ARM, but because I love them :)
> 

With exception of ARM you are talking about vintage hardware. OP was
asking about new commodity hardware. 


Cheers,
Predrag

> Riccardo

Re: non-wintel hardware choices

[arrowscript]

Why is ARM not mentioned?
patrick@ seems to be doing a great job on this port. Bitrig is also a thing.
i.MX6 processor seem well supported and could easily run desktop stuff like HD 
videos. I think ODROID-C1 run already, no? It's just $35 last time I checked. 
Sabrelite is the standard for i.MX6, though.

Re: non-wintel hardware choices

[Bryan Everly]

Unfortunately PA-RISC doesn't have X support at the console. You can
run X on it and have the Windows render on a SPARC, MIPS or Intel
platform though.

Thanks,
Bryan

> On May 5, 2016, at 7:37 PM, Riccardo Mottola 
wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Gregory Edigarov wrote:
>> if I want to build a non-wintel system with commodity running OpenBSD
without problems, what are my options?
>> preferably something non-apple also, which i will be able to connect
display, mouse, and keyboard, and hopefully run X, etc.
>
> since we don't have Raspberry support, then your choice for reasonable
(albeit almost all obsolete) platform restricts to ultra-sparc (old sparcs are
fun, but slow by any means and also the CPU support is for OpenBSD hit and
miss... 2 of my SparcStations are unstable), PPC (some Amiga boards, older
Macs) and... nothing else. PA-RISC is fun, but I never tried X there.
> And, if you think, the only other machines that could do are Itanium and
Alpha.
>
>
> For most of these, you will notice that base OpenBSD stuff works pretty well
(as does NetBSD and to a lesser degree Linux) but several bigger application
prove quite buggy! Browsers, mail clients.. everything is tested on i386/amd64
only.
> SPARC and PPC seem to me more crashy when bad programming happens, which is
actually a good thing and a reason to keep computing diversity alive. But I
fear it will become worse, the only thing that has a chance is ARM which is
used little-endian. Or embedded PPC, which is used also LE. Big Endian will
perhaps not even taught at school in 10+ years.
>
> On Linux I have Firefox running on PPC, but I read that others have issues
with it on non-intel. Be prepared to find more bugs than usual.
> We at GNUstep take quite some care that things work on PPC, SPARC and ARM,
but because I love them :)
>
> Riccardo

Re: non-wintel hardware choices

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi,

Gregory Edigarov wrote:
if I want to build a non-wintel system with commodity running OpenBSD 
without problems, what are my options?
preferably something non-apple also, which i will be able to connect 
display, mouse, and keyboard, and hopefully run X, etc. 


since we don't have Raspberry support, then your choice for reasonable 
(albeit almost all obsolete) platform restricts to ultra-sparc (old 
sparcs are fun, but slow by any means and also the CPU support is for 
OpenBSD hit and miss... 2 of my SparcStations are unstable), PPC (some 
Amiga boards, older Macs) and... nothing else. PA-RISC is fun, but I 
never tried X there.
And, if you think, the only other machines that could do are Itanium and 
Alpha.



For most of these, you will notice that base OpenBSD stuff works pretty 
well (as does NetBSD and to a lesser degree Linux) but several bigger 
application prove quite buggy! Browsers, mail clients.. everything is 
tested on i386/amd64 only.
SPARC and PPC seem to me more crashy when bad programming happens, which 
is actually a good thing and a reason to keep computing diversity alive. 
But I fear it will become worse, the only thing that has a chance is ARM 
which is used little-endian. Or embedded PPC, which is used also LE. Big 
Endian will perhaps not even taught at school in 10+ years.


On Linux I have Firefox running on PPC, but I read that others have 
issues with it on non-intel. Be prepared to find more bugs than usual.
We at GNUstep take quite some care that things work on PPC, SPARC and 
ARM, but because I love them :)


Riccardo

Re: non-wintel hardware choices

[Christian Weisgerber]

On 2016-05-05, Gregory Edigarov  wrote:

> if I want to build a non-wintel system with commodity running OpenBSD 
> without problems, what are my options?
> preferably something non-apple also, which i will be able to connect 
> display, mouse, and keyboard, and hopefully run X, etc.

There aren't any.

-- 
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber  na...@mips.inka.de

Re: non-wintel hardware choices

[Christian Weisgerber]

On 2016-05-05, "Bryan C. Everly"  wrote:

> The fastest desktop that I own is a SunBlade 2500 Silver (don't let
> the name throw you, it is a tower desktop machine).

That machine is 12 years old.

-- 
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber  na...@mips.inka.de

Re: non-wintel hardware choices

[Ted Unangst]

Gregory Edigarov wrote:
> if I want to build a non-wintel system with commodity running OpenBSD 
> without problems, what are my options?

If you install openbsd, then it won't be wintel. :)

Re: non-wintel hardware choices

[Cody Swanson]

Agreed, SPARC is your best bet for a non-x86 workstation with reasonable X 
support. I have some older SGI hardware that runs OpenBSD but the X support is 
hit and miss and certainly not as refined as the SPARC workstations I've tried. 
I think the last SPARC workstations Sun made were the ultra 25 and ultra 45. I 
have a Sunblade 2500 and even though it's 10 years old it still works fine as a 
desktop. If you are looking at these pay attention to the installed graphics 
option, not all of the cards are supported by X from what I understand.

- On May 5, 2016, at 9:00 AM, Bryan C. Everly br...@bceassociates.com wrote:

Gregory,

I'm a big fan / collector of non Wintel stuff and I run OpenBSD on it
all.  I can tell you that the 64-bit SPARC stuff seems to be the best
fit for your use case in my experience.  The downside is that a
desktop (or heaven forbid laptop) solution hasn't really been
manufactured for a while (please misc@ correct me if I'm wrong here).

The fastest desktop that I own is a SunBlade 2500 Silver (don't let
the name throw you, it is a tower desktop machine).  It has dual
1.6GHz processors and 8GB of RAM.  I put two Sun XVR-100 video cards
in it (the 100 and the 300 are about the best cards you can have with
accelerated X support that I've found).

It's pretty speedy and mostly useful.  The only downside is web
browser support.  Since Firefox and Chromium aren't available for
anything other than i386 and amd64 platforms, it's kind of hit and
miss.  If anyone on the list has a suggestion, I'd really appreciate
it.  This box is good enough to be my daily driver at work if I could
solve that wrinkle.

Thanks,
Bryan


On Thu, May 5, 2016 at 10:30 AM, Gregory Edigarov  wrote:
> Hi  everybody,
>
> if I want to build a non-wintel system with commodity running OpenBSD
> without problems, what are my options?
> preferably something non-apple also, which i will be able to connect
> display, mouse, and keyboard, and hopefully run X, etc.
>
> --
> With best regards,
>   Gregory Edigarov

Re: non-wintel hardware choices

[David Coppa]

On Thu, May 5, 2016 at 5:00 PM, Bryan C. Everly  wrote:
> Gregory,

> It's pretty speedy and mostly useful.  The only downside is web
> browser support.  Since Firefox and Chromium aren't available for
> anything other than i386 and amd64 platforms, it's kind of hit and
> miss.  If anyone on the list has a suggestion, I'd really appreciate
> it.  This box is good enough to be my daily driver at work if I could
> solve that wrinkle.

Firefox used to work on sparc64:

https://rhaalovely.net/~landry/shared/firefox-24.0a1-sparc64.png

https://rhaalovely.net/~landry/shared/firefox-24.0a1-sparc64-2.png

Ciao!
David

Re: non-wintel hardware choices

[Stefan Sperling]

On Thu, May 05, 2016 at 05:30:21PM +0300, Gregory Edigarov wrote:
> Hi  everybody,
> 
> if I want to build a non-wintel system with commodity running OpenBSD
> without problems, what are my options?
> preferably something non-apple also, which i will be able to connect
> display, mouse, and keyboard, and hopefully run X, etc.
> 
> --
> With best regards,
>   Gregory Edigarov
> 

See http://www.openbsd.org/plat.html

In particular, you might be able to find loongson or sparc64 machines
that fit your requirements.

I would not expect big modern web browsers like firefox or chromium
to run on non-intel machines, though, in case you had that in mind.

Re: non-wintel hardware choices

[Bryan C. Everly]

Gregory,

I'm a big fan / collector of non Wintel stuff and I run OpenBSD on it
all.  I can tell you that the 64-bit SPARC stuff seems to be the best
fit for your use case in my experience.  The downside is that a
desktop (or heaven forbid laptop) solution hasn't really been
manufactured for a while (please misc@ correct me if I'm wrong here).

The fastest desktop that I own is a SunBlade 2500 Silver (don't let
the name throw you, it is a tower desktop machine).  It has dual
1.6GHz processors and 8GB of RAM.  I put two Sun XVR-100 video cards
in it (the 100 and the 300 are about the best cards you can have with
accelerated X support that I've found).

It's pretty speedy and mostly useful.  The only downside is web
browser support.  Since Firefox and Chromium aren't available for
anything other than i386 and amd64 platforms, it's kind of hit and
miss.  If anyone on the list has a suggestion, I'd really appreciate
it.  This box is good enough to be my daily driver at work if I could
solve that wrinkle.

Thanks,
Bryan


On Thu, May 5, 2016 at 10:30 AM, Gregory Edigarov  wrote:
> Hi  everybody,
>
> if I want to build a non-wintel system with commodity running OpenBSD
> without problems, what are my options?
> preferably something non-apple also, which i will be able to connect
> display, mouse, and keyboard, and hopefully run X, etc.
>
> --
> With best regards,
>   Gregory Edigarov

non-wintel hardware choices

[Gregory Edigarov]

Hi  everybody,

if I want to build a non-wintel system with commodity running OpenBSD 
without problems, what are my options?
preferably something non-apple also, which i will be able to connect 
display, mouse, and keyboard, and hopefully run X, etc.


--
With best regards,
  Gregory Edigarov