On 9/15/26 16:36, Aaron B. wrote:
On Tue, 15 Sep 2026 15:13:38 -0400 Dennis Clarke <dclarke%blastwave.org@localhost> wrote:with the exception of a single "new" SPARC S7-2 server. It is a 128-core wonder beast with 256G of memory. Sadly it can only run Solaris 11.4 and my attempts with NetBSD have all failed.OpenBSD supports this model: https://www.openbsd.org/sparc64.html Last I checked NetBSD doesn't fully support the sun4v class machines in general. There's no reason NetBSD can't, someone simply nearly needs to put in the time. Which would be a good thing to have happen - lots of older sun4v hardware is out there for quite cheap, with plenty of life left. My Netra T2000 is still going strong; I haven't had problems finding parts for this 20 years old machine.
Some of the sun4v hardware can sport a lot of active cores. Sadly the floating point unit in the early units was a single FPU core surrounded
by a matrix of eight SPARCv9 type cores. A single FPU instruction would and could wait for seven or more clock cycles just to get access to the FPU. Great for integer stuff however. Later on we get things like the S7 and the M7 and monster M8. Usually not seen in the home collection but myself and a few friends all went after the S7-2 when they landed in the off-lease market. In spite of many attempts to get NetBSD to run within a hardware domain I just could not get anything stable. OpenBSD was also a problem. Gentoo Linux runs just fine. Strange but true. -- -- Dennis Clarke RISC-V/SPARC/PPC/ARM/CISC UNIX and Linux spoken