Re: USIII/280R

[Anders Lindgren <ali%df.lth.se@localhost>]

On Fri, 31 Dec 2010, Dave McGuire wrote:

[snip]
>  Same here, NetBSD/sparc64 is every bit as stable as i386.  I run it almost 
> exclusively on Netra T1 and X1 machines...about a dozen of them at customer 
> sites.  They are rock solid.
>
>  That's UltraSPARC-II of course.
[snip]

Hrrm? I had nothing but rock hard deadlocks (as in "power cycle the box") 
with my Enterprise 3000/3500, and eventually gave up around the time of 
5.0 release[0]. Some time later there was a swirl of activity around 
UltraSPARC-III support, but in a private mail someone explained that there 
was little chance of any of that work improving the situation for USII. 
Has something significant happened for UltraSPARC-II SMP since?

My Enterprise is a 6-way box and I remember some people claiming that they 
had no trouble with dual-cpu systems at the time, but killing the 6-cpu 
machine was dead easy. Just run build.sh and wait a couple of hours. Or 
run build.sh -j7 and wait less than 9 minutes. But maybe those problems 
are somehow specific to old SBus Enterprise boxen... :-/

I'd love to try to get NetBSD onto it again, but I wasn't aware that USII 
SMP ever reached a state that was generally considered stable. Has anyone 
successfully run it on older SMP systems with > 2 CPUs?

[0] IIRC official 5.0 was the last attempt I made.

/ali:)