[OpenIndiana-discuss] OpenSolaris on SPARC

[Martin Bochnig]

On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 11:17 PM, Sašo Kiselkov <skiselkov.ml at gmail.com> wrote:
>> So either you install SXCE_125 to one of your boxes and then I give
>> you 5.11 test bins, or I rather would like to encourage you, until I
>> have the entire OS finished.
>> The problem during the last 2 years was, that I did lots of _other_
>> things. As I see you fellows waiting, I push priorities. After all, I
>> enjoy this stuff a lot, too.
>
> I'd rather wait for a full release then. I was trying to test ZFS
> booting off of a Netra 240 once, but hosed it (I guess the old OBP in
> those machines didn't support that)


Hmm, maybe. I have no 240, as my priority are the workstations.
But actually an old OBP version itself should not prevent ZFS-boots
(maybe in your specific case yes, but generally rather no).
ZFS boot was introduced on SPARC together with the newboot project
(which introduces booting off a ramdisk) :

http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Community+Group+on/2007120701


 Admittedly since newboot's integration boot times were skyrocketing
on old SPARC's. And memory requirements went up from 128MB or
something to 768 MB or better 1GB.
"newboot" came in nv_80, if I recall correctly.

So while this technology does enable booting off ZFS roots, it is at
the same time sluggish on old hardware.
Plus in some cases there were problems with OBP (not only with
obsolete versions). OBP would report memory access errors and refuse
to boot.

For this reason I always ondered, if one should offer _two_ flavours
of our SPARC-distro, a most recent one with newboot and everything
since then, and one for really slow machines witthout newboot.
But that's most certainly a dumb idea, because then one either needed
to take a vintage pre nv_80 OS/Net for that, or one needed to strip
newboot out of Illumos.latest (only for that second "legacy" distro
for really old machines.
But that's nonsense, because if somebody wants to run a quick slim
ZFS-less distro on such old hardware, he would probably take Solaris8
and CDE in the first place.
So forget my remarks  ...
I just tell you my thoughts that I had long ago  ...


And after all, On my Ultra 1 with UltraSPARC I 167 MHz with a vintage
OBP version, newboot functions without problems (as I stuffed 768 MB
into it). And this Ultra 1 runs SXCE 125 with ZFS root.




%mab