FreeBSD 5.2.1 On SPARC64 87
JigSaw writes "FreeBSD has a solid reputation in terms of features and performance on x86, powering sites from Hotmail to Yahoo, yet it doesn't tend to be the first (or even second) OS that comes to mind with many people when thinking of Solaris alternatives for the SPARC platform. Tony Bourke tests FreeBSD 5.2.1 on his SPARC machine."
Tier 1 and no video, and server only? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm currently running gentoo on my sunblade 100. Since both netbsd and FreeBSD doesnt support video, only serial connections. I had a hella of a time looking for another OS besides Solaris, and Gentoo was the most up2date one I found. SuSE/Redhat dropped support years ago.
I had to drop SuSE, and switch to Gentoo for a newer kernel and true framebuffer support on my Sunblade. Also the binary packages for the Sparc 2004 is done, so you can install a sparc 5/20 without compiling. (I was told sparc-2004 was done last week on #gentoo-sparc on freenode irc network, but have not confirmed it.) Going to put Gentoo on my Sparc 20.
Also, the article shows they tested the 2.4 linux kernel, would be nice to see how 2.6 on sparc performs. I havn't tried 2.6 yet, as its still development on sparc.
Re:Tier 1 and no video, and server only? (Score:5, Interesting)
I've also got a bunch of ISO's here at present for BSD (Net/Open/Free) on sparc64, so my next thought is to try out FreeBSD. This article therefore is a welcome and timely suprise.
Re:Tier 1 and no video, and server only? (Score:2)
It's not a SPARC port it's a SPARC64 port (Score:3)
Admittedly the lack of SCSI on Ultra-1 and Ultra-2 boxes keeps it off older 64-bit systems for the most part.
and no video support
Are you up to date? The web page [freebsd.org] claims sunblade 100 fully supported.
Re:Tier 1 and no video, and server only? (Score:1)
Re:Tier 1 and no video, and server only? (Score:1)
Woohoo for FreeBSD (Score:5, Insightful)
Somebody mentioned the lack of video support, honestly, there is almost 0-market for a GUI on a FreeBSD/sparc64 machine. If someone wants to run FreeBSD on sparc64 hardware, it's most definitely for a server.
Just be happy, FreeBSD 5.2.x is progressing along nicely, and we're getting closer and closer to -STABLE with it.
One thing to remember when using FreeBSD, is that it's mainly a server OS; that can do userland too, but is primarily for servers.
Re:Woohoo for FreeBSD (Score:1, Troll)
Re:Woohoo for FreeBSD (Score:2)
Re:Woohoo for FreeBSD (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Woohoo for FreeBSD (Score:2, Informative)
I wouldn't expect either to update their boxes but I would feel safer with a non-updated *nix d
Re:Woohoo for FreeBSD (Score:1)
Re:Woohoo for FreeBSD (Score:2)
Consider NetBSD too (Score:5, Interesting)
Which brings up a point: both NetBSD/Sparc and NetBSD/Sparc64 will run on an Ultra 1, which is a 64 bit machine. Why doesn't somebody install each NetBSD port on two seperate Ultra 1 machines. Then the benchmark comparision can be between the normal apps that build on both systems, running in parallel on two identical systems. Its exactly the same codebase except for the 32 or 64 bittedness.
Re:Consider NetBSD too (Score:2)
Re:Consider NetBSD too (Score:2)
Who cares (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Who cares (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Who cares (Score:5, Informative)
If you've got some old hardware, and you want to run some license-inencombered operating system, then the alternative operating systems are a great bet.
There a numerous other advantages as well, such as much more extended hardware support (Sun wants you to pay $400 for a FE card, where you can use a $10 off-the-shelf PCI card with FreeBSD, NetBSD, etc), access to the source code, perhaps a smaller footprint, access to security patches for applications that Sun might charge for (not all of Sun's patches are free).
While people shouldn't just abandon Solaris, I love it too, there are plenty of cases where the alternatives make more sense than Solaris.
Re:Who cares (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Who cares (Score:1)
I guess it's all about what you are most comfortable with and your budget/free time.
Trolling in BSD section. (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps, without all these troll posts, Slashdot forum could become a good way to exchange information about BSD vs Linux, or just about BSD in general. As you can see, in the quality discussion, that happened here -- perhaps some Sparc64 FreeBSD users will switch to Gentoo if they want video; perhaps some people trying to install Gentoo on displayless Sparcs will try BSD.
That was just 1 article and 3 comments, and it already helped a few people.
Perhaps, BSD people, who post here stories, could get together and send a petition in some form to Rob Malda, as there is not much sense in seiding him individual e-mails. The situation is not too good.
And, to the trolling crowd... well, in general, I really admire the way you're having fun - all that trolling folklore can be really much creative, and sometimes i ROTFLed watching your nonsense replies - all those penisbird ASCIIs, hidden links to goatse, "mod parent down, site is a goatse link" when the parent was 100% good URL - yea, that was trolling, but that was acceptable trolling, if you ask me (well, I like Monthy Python also, why shouldn't I like some of your posts). Anyway, you don't come up with anything fresh. All that "BSD is dying, you don't have to be Kreskin" - man, I've seen that many, many times. Why do you keep repeating this? It's not funny anymore, it's boring. Also, with some filtering it is very easy to cut it out. Another thing - perhaps if you'd spent some time on actually installing & using some of BSD systems a bit, you'd realize, that BSDs - as all operating systems - have their weak points. Perhaps moving the level of trolling frmo nonsense copy-paste to highly specialized flamewar could bring anything new to the table, because now you aren't creative anymore. And non-creative troll is a lame troll, if you ask me. So, I suggest, that you rather come up with something new, or copy-paste "BSD is dying" posts somewhere else - because continuing to do that doesn't impress me much, really.
Re:Trolling in BSD section. (Score:2)
As it seems, that 90% of the trolling today was sent as Anonymous Coward, perhaps disabling anonymous posting completly would make BSD section of slashdot a nice place to discuss again, just like it should be.
Or make ACs get -1 (or worse) starting out on the posts in your prefs. Also if the AC trolls do decide to get users, just add them to your Foes list and make those start out with a lesser score.
Occasionally being AC can be useful, especially if you want to post something *gasp* anonymously, or don
Re:EAT MY SHIT TURDBURGLAR. I'LL POST TROLLS AS I (Score:1)
Re:Trolling in BSD section. (Score:2)
slashdot bsd forum often appear as a osdn sponsored forum for linux marketeers to cowardly trash another solution to a common problem than what sports their own personal agendas.
On the other hand by giving in to the cowards will be like the us congressmen that encourage privacy intrusion in protection of plutocracy.
<sarcasm>rename the forum to "forum for trashing bsd"</sarcasm> my karma used to be excellent, now I'm probably marked for life.
Running it here... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:learn from your mistakes please (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, you can pkg_add http://URL, and it will automatically fetch dependent packages, but the problem is, you need to know the exact url. Package name, package version,
I suppose I will be doing some work in this area with NetBSD packages collection (pkgsrc) [pkgsrc.org], but that should be easily portable to FreeBSD and OpenBSD ports. The whole idea is, that if you generate an index file for all binary packages on the site. Information would include the description, requirements, size - pretty much everything found in +* files (+DESCR, +COMMENT, +PLIST and other) - perhaps I could use Berkeley DB format for it. Then, in an user-level utility, you just need to give one URL to fetch that description file (bzipped, of course). Then, such utility could work much like Debian's apt-get and apt-cache - a frontend to pkg_add and a quick way to browse all available, but uninstalled software. We'd have a friendly utility for new users for all BSDs.
Also, as pkgsrc is portable [pkgsrc.org] and there are already binary packages avialable for Linux [netbsd.org] (not to mention NetBSD, of course) from the latest branch of pkgsrc -- we'd just need to add that small utility to bootstrap binary kit for pkgsrc, and you'd have then binary pkgsrc available for your box -- pretty much for all Linux distributions. These are all cool projects, and they can give you perhaps much more, than some Linux distributions (especially those ones, who "lock" user in a maze of incompatible binary packages and their dependencies
And, perhaps, if FreeBSD Ports not impress you, when compared to Gentoo, perhaps you should try then NetBSD packages collection [pkgsrc.org]. Maybe the number of operating systems and platforms will somehow impress you, it impress me for sure. Of course, there are bigger and smaller problems, as they always are, in any opensource product, but perhaps with more users activley contributing to the project (just by testing the packages -- that's just using some of your CPU cycles on pkgsrc, instead SETI@Home
BSD? Dead? I don't think so. There's massive active development going on in all areas of each of the BSDs, there are thousands of lines of code shared among developers, lot of new ideas submited, lots of problems solved. There are a lot of companies and sites using it (among others, About.com, Yahoo!, distributed.net, Juniper, NASA)... Check uptime stats on Netcraft [netcraft.com] itself, FreeBSD rules in the top ten.
Its just perhaps BSD people are usually too busy doing their projects to comment here, so you can get a false impression
Have a nice day!
Re:learn from your mistakes please (Score:1, Informative)
You don't. Try "pkd_add -r package_name". It will fetch and install package that is appropriate for your FreeBSD architecture and version.
Pity it's only SPARC64... (Score:4, Interesting)
...because I only have Sun/Texas Instruments SPARC boxen, no Fujitsus around here I'm afraid.
Oh, I see, they mean SPARCv9. Why couldn't they say so? Given the number of manufacturers who make SPARC [sparc.com] processing units it's a bit of a shame that many Open Source projects only claim to support the one manufacturer's chips.
BTW has anyone got any experiences of running this on TI UltraSPARC IV machines that they'd like to share?
Dillon still contributing to FreeBSD (Score:2)
CVS log for src/sys/sparc64/sparc64/uio_machdep.c
Revision 1.2 / (download) - annotate - [select for diffs], Sat Apr 3 09:16:26 2004 UTC (2 days, 4 hours ago) by alc
Branch: MAIN
CVS Tags: HEAD
Changes since 1.1: +1 -1 lines
Diff to previous 1.1 (colored)
In some cases, sf_buf_alloc() should sleep with pri PCATCH; in others, it
should not. Add a new parameter so that the caller can specify which is
the case.
Reported by: dillon
Sun Blade 1500 (Score:2)
Has anyone ever gotten anything to install on a Sun Blade 1500 other than Solaris 8?
I have a brand new Blade1500 sitting next to me at work and it won't even run Solaris 9.
It's a total piece of crap -- Debian won't boot and I couldn't get NetBSD up either.
Sun really put out a piece of work when their own OS won't run on it...
thanks,
davidu
Re:Sun Blade 1500 (Score:1)
Re:Sun Blade 1500 (Score:1)
few notes - make the kernel as small as possible, 1.5M or so is too big,
was able to boot strap the install from debian woody with 2.4.18, after trying various other offerings from gentoo and aurora, but
note no cdrom or floppy was available, and nfsroot failed due to nfslockd on the linux lap