USII MP (Re: USIII/280R)

[Julian Coleman <jdc%coris.org.uk@localhost>]

Hi,

> 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?

I installed a Dec 17 current on my 4 processor E420R (450Mhz USII) and tried
a build.sh -j 8 (distribution + X + kernels, src and obj on NFS).

With 5.* and earlier, it would always hang at some point.  With current, it
finished the build with no problems (9 hours for distribution + X, 20-25
minutes per kernel).  So, I would say that USII MP is much improved in
current.  I haven't tried with more than 4 CPU's though, but I think that
it's worth trying again.

Thanks Matt and Martin!

J

PS.  Note, that we don't support the clock board, nor the FC-AL chipset on
the E3500.   There is an OpenBSD driver for the clock board (fhc), so that
could be ported.  For the socal FC-AL chipset, there are only Linux and
OpenSolaris drivers.

-- 
  My other computer also runs NetBSD    /        Sailing at Newbiggin
        http://www.netbsd.org/        /   http://www.newbigginsailingclub.org/