Re: No surprise with the boot process on the SPARC S7-2

[Dennis Clarke <dclarke%blastwave.org@localhost>]

On 10/24/26 15:15, Palle Lyckegaard wrote:
> On Sat, 24 Oct 2026, Dennis Clarke wrote:
>
> > Just a follow up. The terminal interface is nearly unusable.
> > Just horrible. I think my eyes began to bleed.
>
> I have used 'xterm' - that produces nice output.

The console one may attain from the Solaris 11.4 LDOM is not what
I would call an XTerm. It is not even a valid VT100. Best to think of
it as a "dumb" line printer type terminal and woe be unto thee if you
try to highlight with your mouse and then paste. All manner of very bad
things happen.


> > So there is the sysinst segfault I was told about.
>
> Yes we have a longstanding issue with user processes crashing under 
> certain conditions.
> >

Yup.


> > Perhaps the only way forwards is to create a whole disk image elsewhere
> > and then somehow present that to the LDOM. Far far more work than should
> > be required at this point. Let's just say that something boots and then
> > the installer is a horror show and maybe there is a way forwards. Maybe.
>
> Please don't give up :-)
>
> We will eventually track down the issue...
>
> Thanks for trying out on your cool sun4v S7 system :-)


I took a break from the NetBSD experiment and moved over to Gentoo
Linux. Well guess what? It makes a bit of progress and then just locks
up as frozen. Over and over I would reboot and go through the motions
and then Linux would just freeze. So I know this due to the fact that
there are a ton of patches flying about in the wild for modern SPARC.
Those patches are not going upstream or some other such problem. So that
pushed Linux off the table.

At least the Solaris 11.4 works like a charm or the machine would be a
brick and I would have to toss it into the recycle pile in the same way
I tossed a fully loaded Fujitsu M3000 server. Even toss the 64G ECC mem.
Sad but true.

So today, a Sunday? With coffee and no better plans I shall once again
put my nose to the grindstone and try to get a fully populated NetBSD
filesystem image made. Somehow.

Do the NetBSD people have an IRC channel? I do most things with the
Libera #blastwave channel open in my life and there are a ton of very
sharp IT people that gather. I am certain we have the skill sets in the
aggregate of brains. Who knows, maybe even a documented process that
will work in a deterministic manner on modern SPARC servers. If I get a
larger T7-2 or M8 then NetBSD will be of great value.




--
--
Dennis Clarke
RISC-V/SPARC/PPC/ARM/CISC
UNIX and Linux spoken