[OpenIndiana-discuss] oi or hipster for ultra5?

Mon Feb 2 22:26:12 UTC 2015

You're welcome.  I got even more curious and am starting to play with
FreeBSD too.  Actually got the old jumpstart-style rarp/bootp/tftp/nfs
install thing working since I ran out of CDs in the wee hours of the
morning :\  It actually worked great.

  I've quite a few SPARC machines ranging from SPARC 2 to SPARC 10 to Ultra
1& 2& 5 to T1000&2000 around if I can help out with further Tribblix
testing or maybe a little dev.

--jake

On Mon, Feb 2, 2015 at 4:01 PM, Peter Tribble <peter.tribble at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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
> > >>
> > >
> > >
> > _______________________________________________
> > openindiana-discuss mailing list
> > openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org
> > http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
> >
>
>
>
> --
> -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
>