retire an Ultra30?!

vap0rtranz · Posted: Wed Jul 25, 2007 8:40 am Post subject: retire an Ultra30?!

I got an Ultra30 (512M, 2x9G disks, keyboard, mouse,monitor) to learn Solaris for a job but don't work there anymore and am hesitant to retire the box -- especially with all the 64-bit hubbub in AMD/Intel circles. Is this box stable on Gentoo? (kernel >=2.6.18 ? and genuinely 64-bit??)

If neg on retiring it, what are you guys using Sparcs for? headless servers?
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"Here on the moon, our weekends are so advanced, they encompass the entire week." ~ Ignignokt

alex.blackbit · Advocate Joined: 26 Jul 2005 Posts: 2397

IMHO sparc machines are excellent hardware and can be used for many things under solaris, linux, *bsd.
i do not know the ultra30 in particular, but as i remember from quite old sun machines you cannot connect standard pc peripherals to it, and that's a quite unpleasant behavior in a home datacenter environment. for such purposes i like the alphas much more.

gust4voz · Posted: Wed Jul 25, 2007 7:42 pm Post subject:

The ultra 30 is PCI so basically you can connect some standard pc stuff (like NICs, not wireless though).
Works kind of well with linux, it's a bit picky in the booting section, disable autoboot to install from cd otherwise you may have strange issues, you can re-enable it later for disk probably.
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Gustavo Zacarias
Gentoo/SPARC monkey

vap0rtranz · Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2007 1:39 pm Post subject:

Cool. Well it's onboard NIC still works and I have (as I said) all the Sun hardware to connect to it but its nice to know that it's (mostly) PCI friendly. Actually I used it off and on these last few months as a backup workstation because everything wokrs. Solaris9 and Mozilla 1.[something] weren't zippy but it still all worked.

So is the sparc port for linux all 64-bit? I thought 32-bit only or emulation was a big hiccup ... last I heard ...
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"Here on the moon, our weekends are so advanced, they encompass the entire week." ~ Ignignokt

gust4voz · Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2007 2:35 pm Post subject:

The kernel is 64-bit, userland is 32-bit.
Unless one process needs more than 4G of contiguous RAM it's kinda pointless to have 64-bit UL on sparc since the processor can still use the extra registers and instructions with a 32-bit UL.
With a 64-bit UL you'll only get the extra per-process addressing (and bigger pointers thus making binaries bigger), which would only make sense for a machine that actually has more than 4G RAM and runs something like a huge SQL server or so.
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Gustavo Zacarias
Gentoo/SPARC monkey

vap0rtranz · Posted: Fri Jul 27, 2007 12:42 am Post subject:

gust4voz · Posted: Fri Jul 27, 2007 12:39 pm Post subject:

Actually you could tell other processor architectures are limited in that regard :-)

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Gustavo Zacarias
Gentoo/SPARC monkey

DeadlyMuffin · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 29 Sep 2004 Posts: 104

My ultra 30 works great with Gentoo or Debian. Mine doesn't have a cdrom drive or a floppy though, so I had to netboot