On Sat, 7 Aug 2004, JuhaSievi-Korte wrote:

> Date: Sat, 07 Aug 2004 20:00:15 +0300
> From: JuhaSievi-Korte <juha.sievi-korte@sci.fi>
> To: port-sparc64@netbsd.org
> Subject: Netbsd on Sun Ultra 5
> 
> Hi list!
>
> I thought to write a little "feedback", perhaps some developers are 
> subscribing this list :)
>
> I recently got my hands on an used Sun Ultra 5, 128MB RAM and 270MHz 
> Ultrasparc IIi processor. I was seeking the web for operating systems that 
> support this hardware (as a long-term NetBSD user I already knew that it can 
> be run on Sun Ultra).
>
> One night with google: Debian and Gentoo were only decent Linux distributions 
> available for sun4u, I don't like Gentoo at all and for Debian I couldn't 
> find any bootable netinstallation cd-mediums (though I don't feel very 
> comfortable with it neither:). FreeBSD is supposed to run on this, but I 
> found couple of comments that it can only be installed over serial console - 
> so I didn't even try it.
>
> So I was starting with NetBSD 1.6.2... This was my first time ever with Sun 
> hardware, so I wasn't familiar with the prom at all. I followed some 
> instructions and tried to get it boot from cdrom, no go. Bunch of errors when 
> it couldn't open boot disk, or loaded file doesn't seem executable, etc. One 
> time I got sysinst to load but it crashed. I was quite unhappy, because only 
> Solaris (which was installed when I got this) seemed to boot. I tried to 
> change cdrom-drive, no go, but at this point I was digging deeper with prom 
> and found some usable diagnostic commands - all of the IDE drives weren't 
> recognized at every boot, so I started to suspect a HW problem. And so it 
> was, my 300W PSU wasn't enough for this. Replaced a PSU with a quality one, 
> and everything started to work smoothly :)

huh -- that's strange! 300watts not enough for a single USIIi, 128MByte 
RAM and a litte IDE stuff...?

i just wonder because my Ultra Enterprise 2 (this one runs Solaris, 
though, because of 'the MP issue' ;) has 1,5GByte RAM, two 400MHz USII, 
two SCA HDs, two gfx cards, an additional QFE (draws quite a lot of power 
i guess -- it gets *warm* ;)... and has it's standard 350watt PSU.

>
> I had read on OSReview that this could be unstable port, the reviewer was 
> experiencing crashes with sysinst, couldn't compile code and so on... BUT 
> everything worked fine with this, no single crash, panic, compile problem or 
> whatever. Compiled my own kernel, and have installed (compiled) a bunch of 
> software from pkgsrc. No single problem. Was I lucky?
>

AFAIK there's still the 'sleeps forever' issue, but i ran into it last 
lots of weeks ago, so i really don't mind that way.

> So the point of this very long mail, thank you very much for the good work 
> done. I'm avaiting for an upgrade to 2.0 :)
>
> But a little question, the default gcc seems to be 2.95.3 (/usr/bin/gcc) Also 
> there seems to be version 3.3.4 (/usr/pkg/gcc3/bin/gcc). Suggestions, should 
> I use the 3.3.4 as default? I think some programs from the pkgsrc used the 
> newer version...

depends on your needs. if you want to go into production, i'd stick with 
2.95. if you want to play with some new compiler settings and so on, try 
3.3 (maybe you want to rebuild the whole system w/3.3?). perhaps you want 
to go testing 2.0BETA?

regards,

timo