[Fedora-sparc] SPARC Status

[Lamar Owen]

On Thursday, September 20, 2012 09:03:14 AM Patrick Ale wrote:
> On Sep 19, 2012 12:06 AM, "Patrick Ale" <patrick.ale at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > More will follow soon.
> >
> 
> As expected: firmware from 2006. Its installing now.
> Something I really miss during the installation is the option to manually
> layout/review the file systems when installing via console in text mode. Or
> I just overlook it?
> 
> I am using vnc now to work around it. :)
> 

Hmm, I seem to remember some issues around the partitioning under F12 on SPARC.  It was recommended, best I can recall, that you let the installer autopartition; anything else is very unstable and will likely crash anaconda.

Once installed you can set up partitions, move LVM around (I did that with our E6500, taking the defaults at first onto a single drive, and then moving the physical volume (with the LVM tools) to a software RAID5.  Worked fine.) set up RAID, or whatever else.  But it was important, IIRC, to take the defaults during installation.  There is a set of posts in the archives about the installer caveats, and I think it's on the F12Beta page on Fedoraproject.org, or at least it used to be.

I have my own private archive of messages like that to this mailing list, and I can repost if mecessary.

I'm currently running F12Beta updated (the update, incidentally, is less stable than the original install was) on a Blade 1000 workstation with dual CPU's:
[root at sb1k-1 ~]# cat /proc/cpuinfo
cpu             : TI UltraSparc III (Cheetah)
fpu             : UltraSparc III integrated FPU
pmu             : ultra3
prom            : OBP 4.5.10 2002/02/11 10:38
type            : sun4u
ncpus probed    : 2
ncpus active    : 2
D$ parity tl1   : 0
I$ parity tl1   : 0
Cpu0ClkTck      : 000000002cb41780
Cpu1ClkTck      : 000000002cb41780
MMU Type        : Cheetah
State:
CPU0:           online
CPU1:           online
[root at sb1k-1 ~]#

Don't remember how to get CPU MHz from this, unfortunately.  While I do have remote serial console and could get it from OpenBoot, I'm enjoying:
[root at sb1k-1 ~]# uptime
 09:57:46 up 706 days, 18:30,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
[root at sb1k-1 ~]# 

I don't have the E6500 up at the moment, but it was last booting F12Beta as well, on (IIRC) 16 CPUs, each one 400MHz. I've documented the boot procedure for SBUS and F12 on this list before, including the kernel command line options required to get a successful (manual) boot with dracut, up through RAID and LVM, given that F12's udev on SBUS is borked.