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wah
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Joined: 25 Feb 2005
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Location: Raleigh, NC, USA

PostPosted: Wed Aug 02, 2006 8:29 pm    Post subject: SPARC Success / Questions [solved - thanks!] Reply with quote

Hi Gentoo SPARC users!

My office has a sundry of old Sparc-based systems lying around (anywhere from SPARCstations to Ultra5/10/60's to Sunblade100's), so having installed Gentoo many times on AMD64 and x86 archs, I decided to try my hand at a SPARC. I chose the Ultra10, as it was the only one I could initially get to boot with my limited Sun experience :lol: - anyway, I was able to install gentoo-sources-2.6.17-r4 via the experimental 2.6 LiveCD (thanks gust4voz!) and once I got my IDE driver sorted (lspci indicates a Silicon Chipset, when it was in fact an old CMD 646) everything booted nicely!

General Question regarding Gentoo on Sparc-based systems - what do you folks use them for? Servers? Workstations? Just curious - I know that my company used them in our now defunct Solaris classes (I work for an IT Training company) and for our ATM classes, equipping them with fiber-channel cards, etc.

Support Question - the only issue that I've found (yet) is that I get the following error a few minutes after reaching my login prompt:
Code:

INIT: Id "s0" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes

I found references to this on the boards, but typically it had to do with c1, c2, etc...I disabled the line in my /etc/inittab that referred to s0 and the error has subsided, but that leads me to believe that I've now disabled the serial console and will not be able to log in via null-modem. Thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Despite that error, I am pleased with the ease of the install for this arch...especially since I knew little to nothing about sparc-based systems prior to this. Thanks for all the hard work, and I look forward to bothering all of you with my questions :wink:

Cheers,
W.
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Last edited by wah on Thu Aug 03, 2006 12:38 am; edited 1 time in total
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gust4voz
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PostPosted: Wed Aug 02, 2006 10:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

s0 is the serial console - you're probably lacking serial port support in your kernel config - it's basically the CONFIG_SERIAL_SUNSAB and CONFIG_SERIAL_SUNSAB_CONSOLE options for u5/10 machines. Default Gentoo linux/sparc installations enable it since many sparc machines don't have a framebuffer console, it's plain safe to disable it if you want so.
In the case of c1...c6 it's the opposite case, when a machine doesn't have a framebuffer, since inittab has these enabled by default too.
CMD was bought by Silicon Image, that's the reason the IDE chipset shows up as SI rather than CMD these days.
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wah
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PostPosted: Thu Aug 03, 2006 12:35 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

gust4voz wrote:
s0 is the serial console - you're probably lacking serial port support in your kernel config - it's basically the CONFIG_SERIAL_SUNSAB and CONFIG_SERIAL_SUNSAB_CONSOLE options for u5/10 machines. Default Gentoo linux/sparc installations enable it since many sparc machines don't have a framebuffer console, it's plain safe to disable it if you want so.


Hi gust4voz! Thanks for all the info - based on what you're saying above, by disabling the s0 line in /etc/inittab, I'm ok? SPARC's are my first real experience with accessing a system via serial console (except cisco routers, but they don't count), so I just wanted to make sure. I'm currently accessing the box via ssh, so it really doesn't make too much difference if I've got serial access or not...for what its worth, I'm pretty sure I do have support built into the kernel - however, I'll double check when I'm back in the office tomorrow.

Quote:
CMD was bought by Silicon Image, that's the reason the IDE chipset shows up as SI rather than CMD these days.

Yes, once I had dug around enough, I recalled running into that before - it had just been a while. Threw me for a loop, as I was convinced I had done something else wrong in the kernel...seems I just needed one more driver :wink:

Thanks for the response - we've got some more sparcs at the office, so I plan on giving each a shot and seeing what I can come up with!

Cheers,
W.
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gentunian
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Joined: 10 Jul 2006
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Location: Río Cuarto, Argentina

PostPosted: Thu Nov 23, 2006 2:58 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

we are having the same problem in a ULTRA SUN 1 CREATOR. We've downloaded the iso image and we booted the kernel 2617, without problems. The instalation was fine, we install the 2.4.33 kernel for sparc, and we compiled fine. We set the 2006.1 profile and we proceed to reboot the system, and then it crashes all the way.

It appeared after the "INIT: version 2.8", and the errors are:

Quote:

Unimplemented SPARC system call 211
...
INIT: ld "s0" respawning too fast ...
...
INIT: ld "c1" respawning too fast ...
...


We read the forums, and in many says to comment the lines in /etc/inittab with c1,c2,c3, etc. The thing is that it didnt work for us. We didnt try the solution by gust4voz, this is a ultra 1. Should we try it?

I forgot to say that the system hangs saying "No more processes left in this runlevel", any ideas?

Thanks,
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Plugin_baby
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Joined: 18 Aug 2005
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 23, 2006 4:00 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I also had the 'respawning too fast' issue, which stopped when I commented the serial consoles line (s0 I think).
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