[OpenIndiana-discuss] oi or hipster for ultra5?

[Peter Tribble]

On Sun, Feb 1, 2015 at 11:32 PM, Jacob Ritorto <jacob.ritorto at gmail.com>
wrote:

> tribblix dies a few seconds after starting to boot with
> Loading: /platform/SUNW,Ultra-5_10/boot_archive
> Loading: /platform/sun4u/boot_archive
>
> Can't open boot_archive
> Fast Data Access MMU Miss
>

Hey, thanks for testing (and the bug report...)!

You did read the bit about "experimental", "works for me", and "only
tested on a T5140"? There's a reason those caveats apply, it hasn't
seen much testing outside my single lab box. It was only at the end of
last week that I burnt an actual iso and did a physical boot (as opposed
to running an LDOM off the iso image file).

So this is both encouraging and discouraging. The ISO is valid (that's the
good bit) but doesn't have a boot archive it can find. OK, I can add a
symlink to get around that particular error in the build.

You're still going to have the problem that the boot archive is too large.
I'm currently down to a 172M archive rather than 200M, but that's
really going to have to get down to ~100M before booting on a 256M
machine is viable. I can just about see how to get down to 120M,
but it's going to get more interesting beyond that.


> Bummer.
>
> Thanks very much, nonetheless, for keeping SPARC in mind, Peter!
>
>
>
> On Sun, Feb 1, 2015 at 3:57 PM, Jacob Ritorto <jacob.ritorto at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Hmm, yeah, Tribblix sounds like a great option for my purposes.  Is there
> > X support?  That'd be nice so I can free up the other serial port.
> (Trying
> > to simultaneously run a serial console to the pdp11 as well as an
> emulated
> > tu58 drive via the other serial port.) I think I'll give it a whirl.
> > OpenBSD can boot from floppy and install via Internet, so that's great,
> but
> > I can't seem to find any floppies that'll still format.  This is heck-of
> > retro :)
> >
> > thx
> > jake
> >
> >
> > On Sun, Feb 1, 2015 at 2:22 PM, Peter Tribble <peter.tribble at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> >> >   Is it feasible to install Hipster or OI on such a meagerly appointed
> >> > machine?  I don't even have a dvd player; just cd.
> >> >
> >> > SunOS beep 5.11 snv_65 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-5_10
> >> > Memory size: 256 Megabytes
> >> >
> >>
> >> That's a sparc box. You aren't going to be able to run OI
> >> (any version, including hipster) or most of the illumos distros.
> >>
> >> You've really got 2 options. OpenSXCE or Tribblix.
> >>
> >> http://www.opensxce.org/
> >> http://www.tribblix.org/download.html
> >>
> >> Now, the Tribblix iso should fit on a CD. (Although to be
> >> honest that's largely accidental as I haven't built most
> >> of the packages for sparc yet.) As should the OpenSXCE
> >> text iso.
> >>
> >> The really hard part is going to be booting the CD in that
> >> small amount of memory. The root archive on the Tribblix
> >> iso is currently 200M, and that gets loaded into memory -
> >> you really don't have any space left to breathe. (I don't
> >> know offhand how big the OpenSXCE boot archive is,
> >> but it's likely to be pretty similar.)
> >>
> >> This isn't a truly fundamental problem - the root archive
> >> ends up being pretty large because it has support for
> >> everything in it by default, and it should be possible to
> >> produce a custom iso with a much smaller root archive.
> >> One of the things I'm interested in is minimal-footprint
> >> configurations, so doing that (and any other work to
> >> improve efficiency and reduce the footprint) is on my
> >> agenda, but it's going to take time. (And it's difficult
> >> for me to test, as I don't personally have any sparc
> >> hardware left that's that old or small. On x86 I think
> >> I managed to boot a custom iso in 400M and run in 256M,
> >> but there I can fiddle the settings in a VirtualBox VM.)
> >>
> >> Another way would be to use the existing OS to install
> >> a newer distro in an alternate boot environment.
> >>
> >> In any event, you're likely to be in for a modest amount
> >> of work and you're off into the weeds; the population of
> >> illumos users working on sparc is pretty small.
> >>
> >> --
> >> -Peter Tribble
> >> http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> openindiana-discuss mailing list
> >> openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org
> >> http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
> >>
> >
> >
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-- 
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/