OS Review: NetBSD 1.6.2 on SPARC64

JigSaw writes "NetBSD is the king of operating system portability, running on 40+ different hardware platforms, including x86, MIPS, and even the Sega Dreamcast. So it comes as no surprise that among the supported platforms, NetBSD runs on Tony Bourke's Sun Ultra 5. Here is his review."

Comments

Re:What's the big deal?

[Anonymous Coward]

a 64-bit kernel with 32-bit userland.
NetBSD wants to have 64-bit userland.

Re:Ultra 5? Oh please no

[680x0]

A far better measure of how well an OS has been ported is an Ultra 2.

I have an Ultra 1 (UltraSparc @ 167MHz), and I have to say that my experience installing NetBSD 1.6.1 was quite similar to his experience (panic during install, no binary packages available, etc.) And, besides, the review seemed to focus on the app side of things, not the driver/hardware side.

That said, I don't think there's anything major that can't be fixed. Once installed, it's run flawlessly, and the only package I couldn't compile from pkgsrc is Apache 2.x (I installed Apache 1.x instead).

I've had the (32-bit) sparc port of NetBSD running solidly on a SparcStation-2 for over a year and a half (it's my DHCP/NTP/DNS server).

Re:Too bad

[Kraken137]

Thanks for that pointer... after toying with it for a while, I realized that if I simply created the ld0* devices by hand (a serious pain in the ass), everything was fine and the installation could continue.

Re:Ultra 5? Oh please no

[agent dero]

I installed OpenBSD on my Sparc Station 5 without a hitch, but on my dual CPU ultra2, it paniced in the very end of the installation

Here's some tips:
when it paniced for me, it was really done installing, it will drop you into single-user mode. From there (where I was) you'll really just have to create the rc.conf file. And maybe do some disk-limbo and some network configuration with 'ifconfig' but it's not too difficult.

The same basic thing happened for me with NetBSD when I first tried it, but now, it runs like a champ, give it a try

(I got the Ultra2 from AnySystem.com on eBay for $70, try them out) </shameless plug>

Similar problems

[harikiri]

I have an Ultra5 here at home that I test things out with from time to time. At one stage I envisionged being able to use it as a server running Open/Net/FreeBSD.

NetBSD (1.6.1) had the crashing issues with installer, and once I finally got it installed I too had issues with packages compiling.

So I decided to skip instead ot OpenBSD 3.4. Got that installed, only to discover that the applications it supports in its ports tree is smaller and not up to date.

I then looked into FreeBSD. Now I have an external monitor I use with my Ultra5, and both recently (5.2) and a while back (5.1 or 5.0) I simply couldn't navigate past the initial boot screen to complete the install. The problem with FreeBSD on sparc is that it retains its curses-based install GUI, which renders in some horrible way (term is fucked up) when using a monitor. There are 4 options you can try when using installing, and none of them worked to give me a readable screen. To date I haven't tried installing via console, which could be the key.

Either way, OpenBSD has proved to be the easiest and most stable for installing on Ultrasparc to date, so that's what I'm recommending at present to people at work (have it on a few Ultra 5's and E220's).

Re:Similar problems

[nutznboltz]

Try a serial console. Just plug the ttya port into another computer's serial port with a null modem and use tip or cu.

Re:Ultra 5? Oh please no

[680x0]

I hate to reply to my own comment, but it looks like the binary packages are available for 1.6.2 for sparc64.