Sun Ultra 5/10 "Alternative" PCI video cards

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vtaoe · Post by **vtaoe** » Mon Nov 24, 2003 4:31 am

I recently purchased some as-is "corporate recycled" Sun hardware at rock-bottom prices, and was pleasantly surprised at what I ended up with. For US$75 I scored an Ultra 5 case, an Ultra 10 case, two working mainboards, a working 333 MHz (2 MB cache) processor, an apparently-broken 360 MHz (256k cache) processor, a 9 GB Seagate IDE HDD, two floppy drives, a Creator 3D UPA card, a 250W Ultra 10 P/S (no P/S in the U5), a working Sun CD drive, an apparently-broken Sun CD Drive, 2 x 64 MB of 50 ns RAM, and 2 x 128 MB of 60 ns RAM.

Right now, I am just playing around with everything and learning, as I have no experience with Sun hardware whatsoever. I was most interested in having a working Ultra 5 system (just for its size and desktop form factor), so that rules out using the Creator 3D card. (BTW, anyone know how to identify the part number on Sun's Ultra 5/10 mainboards? I can't seem to locate it anywhere. I have, through process of elimination, pretty much figured out what I've got, mostly by working through the little breadcrumb clues at sunsolve.sun.com--you know, "This module shipped with System Boards 375-0079 and 375-0115," etc.)

I installed free Solaris 9 on it, but was pretty unimpressed, so now I've got it running Gentoo, which I was already familiar with from an x86 box I have. KDE is emerging as I type, so I am anxiously awaiting the appearance of that desktop with the on-board PGX 24 graphics.

However, I also have an old Matrox Millennium II 4 MB PCI card sitting around, and I was wondering if anyone's using Matrox stuff successfully in their Gentoo-Sparc system. 3dfx Voodoo 3 PCI cards are also pretty cheap on eBay (I actually own an old AGP Voodoo 3, but I can't seem to force it into those pesky PCI slots

) and I have considered purchasing one of those as well. Just wondering how well they're supported in XFree under Sparc--you know, OpenGL and all that, as well as 2D acceleration. Obviously, Solaris-compatibility is of little concern to me.

Any thoughts?

smeets_marc · Post by **smeets_marc** » Mon Nov 24, 2003 10:26 am

I recently asked a similar question. The answer I got was very simple: there are only a few pci cards that are supoorted by Sparc. The problem is not (completely) the X driver. The problem is that the bootrom of your sparc has to know how to address the videomodes of your pci card.
Unfortunatly there only some (mostly ati?) cards supported.

look at http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=99045 for some more info.

vtaoe · Post by **vtaoe** » Mon Nov 24, 2003 10:38 am

smeets_marc wrote:The problem is that the bootrom of your sparc has to know how to address the videomodes of your pci card.

look at http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=99045 for some more info.

Thanks for the link. I suppose I'll try the Matrox Millennium II first, since I already own it, and we'll see how things work out. I know that Matrox is well-supported in XFree, but the potential lack of a console framebuffer display seems less than optimal...

bazik · Post by **bazik** » Mon Nov 24, 2003 11:23 am

This may be of use: http://dev.gentoo.org/~bazik/hw.php

vtaoe · Post by **vtaoe** » Mon Nov 24, 2003 5:04 pm

Thanks! I'll see if I can't add to it once I'm done experimenting. I'll try out a Millennium I as well.

As an aside, KDE is done and I am finally able to work from within an X desktop on the SPARC. I am quite impressed. Even with an...ahem..."less efficient" environment like KDE, it is very responsive, much moreso than I would imagine if I, say, ran the same software on an old Celeron 300A system I have sitting around. (Of course, try running Windows XP on that and...zzzzzz!)

vtaoe · Post by **vtaoe** » Tue Nov 25, 2003 1:34 am

And I did find out a (rather inconvenient, from a looking-at-hardware standpoint) method of determining the Sun part number of a mainboard...

Code: Select all

# cat /proc/openprom/model
'SUNW,375-0066'

Still looking for a way to physically read it off the board, though...

Ferris · Post by **Ferris** » Tue Nov 25, 2003 2:02 pm

There is lots of information on these systems at <http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub/>
and chase through the desktop/workstation--EOL systems path.

In particular, you will get to descriptions of the motherboards for these
systems. That will have you more or less at
<http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub/De ... .html#0066>
From there you can download the Service Manuals for these systems.

Since they are both useful and free, you probably want to do this.

Part numbers for the boards should be pretty conspicuous at the front of
the board (at least, for Ultra2 they are).

I do not have any Ultra5s so I cannot further comment on them, but I do nave U2, U10, and U60. For all of them, the handbooks have been indispensible for the investment (i.e. cost of paper & toner to print them).

If you are going to play with swapping CPU's or some such on these
systems, you will want the board descriptions at least, because in some
cases when you change CPU modules, you also have to change jumper
settings on the main board.

Hope that helps (if you are like me, you are finding Sun's sunhelp hard
to get help from

).

stonent · Post by **stonent** » Tue Nov 25, 2003 2:49 pm

http://www.gekkou.co.uk/forum/list.php?f=1

Look here as well. This is the Sun Blade 100/150 forum. But since the blade is basically an updated Ultra 5, most everything there applies.

A lot of PCI based Rage II or Rage XL cards seem to work in Sun workstations.

vtaoe · Post by **vtaoe** » Tue Nov 25, 2003 3:45 pm

Oh yeah, I've been using sunsolve a lot already (see my first post in this thread), and the boards in the Ultra 5 and Ultra 10 I've got have plenty of numbers all over them, but nothing that corresponds to the Sun part numbers, as far as I could tell...

However, I did see mention in the Sun Ultra/Blade Hardware Forum of checking the UPA slot. Sure 'nuff, there's a sticker there that starts with 3750115, so it is, in fact, a 375-0115 as I had deduced. Strange that it is indicating as a 375-0066 with cat /proc/openprom/model... Perhaps the NVRAM was switched from one of those by a previous owner.

--

Thanks for the link to the Sun Blade site. I'll spend some time there perusing. I would've liked to acquire a Blade 100, but they're selling for too much to be considered a steal right now, I think. (And since working on Sparcs is just a hobby for me right now, it kinda has to be!) I guess they're still new enough that they haven't been passed on to any hardware liquidators yet.

BTW, how is the MHz <--> cache size comparison speed-wise between the Ultras and the Blade 100/150? I guess it depends on what you're using them for. For simple workstation use, I would guess the faster processor with the smaller cache would be speedier, but I don't know enough to be certain.