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BSD Operating Systems

OS Review: NetBSD 1.6.2 on SPARC64 58

Posted by michael from the esoterica dept.
JigSaw writes "NetBSD is the king of operating system portability, running on 40+ different hardware platforms, including x86, MIPS, and even the Sega Dreamcast. So it comes as no surprise that among the supported platforms, NetBSD runs on Tony Bourke's Sun Ultra 5. Here is his review."
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OS Review: NetBSD 1.6.2 on SPARC64 More

OS Review: NetBSD 1.6.2 on SPARC64

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  • Ugh. (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Why are you linking to OS News... SO STUPID... I can feel my brain melting... AGGH!

  • the only alternate OS for NeXT boxen? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Artifex ( 18308 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @12:10PM (#8611344) Journal
    I haven't looked recently, but other than NeXTStep, the only OS I ever found that could run on my basic black slab was NetBSD, and even that had to be strapped from a bootserver, with no local disk support. I'm not sure whether it's more a testament to the wacky hardware or how tenacious the NetBSD teams have been that they were able to do this at all...

  • The only real competitor to Linux... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DesScorp ( 410532 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @12:31PM (#8611599) Journal
    ...in the embedded space, that is. I see NetBSD turning up in a lot of devices now, including our new office copier of all things.

    Competition is a good thing, mmmmmkay, as some here would say.

    I have to wonder what's driving Net's adoption in the embedded space. Is it technical merit, or the the BSD license allowing vendors to keep their changes closed?

    I'm just glad to see that Netcraft was wrong :P

    • Re:The only real competitor to Linux... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DashEvil ( 645963 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @02:28PM (#8613194)
      I'm pretty sure that really clean stable code + a license to do whatever you want with it is really all the reason they need.

    • Re:The only real competitor to Linux... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Homology ( 639438 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @03:21PM (#8613778)
      I have to wonder what's driving Net's adoption in the embedded space. Is it technical merit, or the the BSD license allowing vendors to keep their changes closed?

      I've often wondered why some companies choose to use Linux when they are unwilling to show their source code. It clearly has not been to the advantage of the companies involved to be exposed as not complying with the GPL. It is risky business decision to choose to ignore license issues.

      Perhaps more attention will be given to the *BSD family with it's technically very good OS and a free license.


      • I've often wondered why some companies choose to use Linux when they are unwilling to show their source code. It clearly has not been to the advantage of the companies involved to be exposed as not complying with the GPL. It is risky business decision to choose to ignore license issues.

        Perhaps more attention will be given to the *BSD family with it's technically very good OS and a free license.

        EVERY TIME I see a thread here about a company pushing a Linux-based product, I ask the same question: Is ther

  • Ultra 5? Oh please no (Score:5, Interesting)

    by keesh ( 202812 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @12:43PM (#8611789) Homepage
    If you're going to review an OS on an UltraSparc box, please pick anything other than the u5/10. The u5/10 is basically a PC clone with an ultrasparc processor. It has a pisspoor IDE chipset, a crippled CPU (IIi has far less cache than a II), a crippled PCI backplane, low memory bandwidth and a PC-like chipset. A far better measure of how well an OS has been ported is an Ultra 2.

    (and yes, I do know what I'm talking about, and I have sparc-related code in the Linux kernel to prove it :) )
    • It is also cheap to snag on eBay. So are U2's, but well beggars can't be choosers. And if I remember what started all these posts on OS News, it was someone snagging a U5 on ebay or some such. I might be making that up; but i seem to recall. Anyway, for someone wanting to learn about Sparc, Solaris, OpenBoot, and just plain mess around with something different, it is not a bad place to start. And not caring too much about performance what's it matter if he does it on a U5 or U2, and the U5's come in un
      • The U5 and the U10 are the same exact machine. The only difference is the case, PCI riser card, and the CPU speeds they shipped with. The motherboard is identical.

    • Re:Ultra 5? Oh please no (Score:5, Informative)

      by 680x0 ( 467210 ) <vicky.steeds@com> on Friday March 19, 2004 @06:24PM (#8616367) Journal
      A far better measure of how well an OS has been ported is an Ultra 2.
      I have an Ultra 1 (UltraSparc @ 167MHz), and I have to say that my experience installing NetBSD 1.6.1 was quite similar to his experience (panic during install, no binary packages available, etc.) And, besides, the review seemed to focus on the app side of things, not the driver/hardware side.

      That said, I don't think there's anything major that can't be fixed. Once installed, it's run flawlessly, and the only package I couldn't compile from pkgsrc is Apache 2.x (I installed Apache 1.x instead).

      I've had the (32-bit) sparc port of NetBSD running solidly on a SparcStation-2 for over a year and a half (it's my DHCP/NTP/DNS server).

      • Re:Ultra 5? Oh please no (Score:4, Informative)

        by agent dero ( 680753 ) on Friday March 19, 2004 @09:13PM (#8617710) Homepage
        I installed OpenBSD on my Sparc Station 5 without a hitch, but on my dual CPU ultra2, it paniced in the very end of the installation

        Here's some tips:
        when it paniced for me, it was really done installing, it will drop you into single-user mode. From there (where I was) you'll really just have to create the rc.conf file. And maybe do some disk-limbo and some network configuration with 'ifconfig' but it's not too difficult.

        The same basic thing happened for me with NetBSD when I first tried it, but now, it runs like a champ, give it a try

        (I got the Ultra2 from AnySystem.com on eBay for $70, try them out) </shameless plug>
        • I installed OpenBSD on my Sparc Station 5 without a hitch, but on my dual CPU ultra2, it paniced...

          For one thing, OpenBSD doesn't do SMP (yet) and IIRC it will not function with a second processor present. It's not like other hardware, where if it doesn't recognize it, it just ignores it - I seem to recall that it will panic with more than one processor installed.

          • Re:Ultra 5? Oh please no (Score:1, Interesting)

            by Anonymous Coward
            For the record, it _will_ work with x number of CPUs installed, the kernel just won't detect them.
      • We have been migrating production off of U2's (and SS-20's) for a long time. I have a dual processor U2 to play with in my cube. I don't waste my time with CD-ROMs, I just netbooted from FreeBSD and installed that way. Neither NetBSD nor OpenBSD paniced during installation. I preferred the OpenBSD installation program to the NetBSD one, but it's been too long and I don't remember why now.

        Neither OS supported SMP on that box at the time supposedly Linux does, but I haven't tried. I was going to try to

      • Re:Ultra 5? Oh please no (Score:4, Informative)

        by 680x0 ( 467210 ) <vicky.steeds@com> on Monday March 22, 2004 @06:50PM (#8640027) Journal
        I hate to reply to my own comment, but it looks like the binary packages are available for 1.6.2 for sparc64 [netbsd.org].
    • I've got an Ultra2, and it installed like a champ first time out of the box. Did it a few times, once to see what it was like, another to set the partitions to the way I liked it, and a third time after getting sick of trying to get Debian to run. I've given it up for Solaris, as the Creator3D UPA fast frame buffer isn't supported, but it seemed stable and straightforward, and the 64-bit packages I tried installed fine. (OpenBSD doesn't support SMP, and FreeBSD doesn't support Ultra2's and earlier. Linux ma

  • I *hate* OSNews reviews (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Just Some Guy ( 3352 ) <kirk+slashdot@strauser.com> on Friday March 19, 2004 @04:14PM (#8614607) Homepage Journal
    Why, oh why, do I keep letting myself be suckered into reading these piles of drivel? I know I'll lose an IQ point every time I do, but I just can't keep from looking.

    For example, I have no idea why you would ever not use pkgsrc (or ports) to build packages whenever possible. The reviewer goes on for half a page about his troubles compiling OpenSSL from source. No kidding? That's why we have pkgsrc and ports - someone else has already solved all the little problems for you!

    Likewise, he's incredulous that his locally-built package using uber-elite optimization flags runs faster than the downloadable binary package. Frankly, that's like being amazed that a locally-built Debian package may be faster than the generic i386 package that you can download.

    I honestly don't know why they label these diatribes as "reviews", when they should be called "a day spent with a system I don't understand".

  • I can't get it to install on my AlphaServer 2100. I actually attempted a NetBSD 1.6.2 install on it a couple nights ago. The kernel appears to detect the DAC960 RAID controller on boot, but then claims there are no disks attached to the system. Fun fun. FreeBSD locks up whilst scanning the PCI bus.

    • Re:Too bad (Score:2, Informative)

      by beholder77 ( 89716 )
      You can download snapshots of more recent source code on it's way to NetBSD 2.0 at ftp://releng.netbsd.org. I've had very positive experiences with the new kernel and userland so far, but YMMV.

  • Similar problems (Score:4, Informative)

    by harikiri ( 211017 ) on Saturday March 20, 2004 @10:13AM (#8620721)
    I have an Ultra5 here at home that I test things out with from time to time. At one stage I envisionged being able to use it as a server running Open/Net/FreeBSD.

    NetBSD (1.6.1) had the crashing issues with installer, and once I finally got it installed I too had issues with packages compiling.

    So I decided to skip instead ot OpenBSD 3.4. Got that installed, only to discover that the applications it supports in its ports tree is smaller and not up to date.

    I then looked into FreeBSD. Now I have an external monitor I use with my Ultra5, and both recently (5.2) and a while back (5.1 or 5.0) I simply couldn't navigate past the initial boot screen to complete the install. The problem with FreeBSD on sparc is that it retains its curses-based install GUI, which renders in some horrible way (term is fucked up) when using a monitor. There are 4 options you can try when using installing, and none of them worked to give me a readable screen. To date I haven't tried installing via console, which could be the key.

    Either way, OpenBSD has proved to be the easiest and most stable for installing on Ultrasparc to date, so that's what I'm recommending at present to people at work (have it on a few Ultra 5's and E220's).
    • I ran into the same problem when trying to install FreeBSD on my Ultra 5. Try using CTRL N and CTRL B (or CTRL P... been a while :) ) to navigate.

    • Re:Similar problems (Score:3, Informative)

      by Octorian ( 14086 )
      Actually, I was sorely disappointed with my only recent OpenBSD/sparc64 experience. However, I will say that OpenBSD/sparc runs beautifully.

      I had been using an old SPARCstation 5 for something, under OpenBSD, and wanted to upgrade to a more powerful (and rackmount) machine. So I got myself a nice Netra t1 105.

      Initially I tried OpenBSD/sparc64 3.3 on it, of course. Well, getting it to work with a mirrored root disk was very painful, and resulted in 30+ minute boot times whenever there was an impropper s

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