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

the only alternate OS for NeXT boxen?

[Artifex]

I haven't looked recently, but other than NeXTStep, the only OS I ever found that could run on my basic black slab was NetBSD, and even that had to be strapped from a bootserver, with no local disk support. I'm not sure whether it's more a testament to the wacky hardware or how tenacious the NetBSD teams have been that they were able to do this at all...

The only real competitor to Linux...

[DesScorp]

...in the embedded space, that is. I see NetBSD turning up in a lot of devices now, including our new office copier of all things.

Competition is a good thing, mmmmmkay, as some here would say.

I have to wonder what's driving Net's adoption in the embedded space. Is it technical merit, or the the BSD license allowing vendors to keep their changes closed?

I'm just glad to see that Netcraft was wrong :P

Re:The only real competitor to Linux...

[DashEvil]

I'm pretty sure that really clean stable code + a license to do whatever you want with it is really all the reason they need.

Re:The only real competitor to Linux...

[Homology]

I have to wonder what's driving Net's adoption in the embedded space. Is it technical merit, or the the BSD license allowing vendors to keep their changes closed?

I've often wondered why some companies choose to use Linux when they are unwilling to show their source code. It clearly has not been to the advantage of the companies involved to be exposed as not complying with the GPL. It is risky business decision to choose to ignore license issues.

Perhaps more attention will be given to the *BSD family with it's technically very good OS and a free license.

Ultra 5? Oh please no

[keesh]

If you're going to review an OS on an UltraSparc box, please pick anything other than the u5/10. The u5/10 is basically a PC clone with an ultrasparc processor. It has a pisspoor IDE chipset, a crippled CPU (IIi has far less cache than a II), a crippled PCI backplane, low memory bandwidth and a PC-like chipset. A far better measure of how well an OS has been ported is an Ultra 2.

(and yes, I do know what I'm talking about, and I have sparc-related code in the Linux kernel to prove it :) )

Re:Ultra 5? Oh please no

[xaoslaad]

It is also cheap to snag on eBay. So are U2's, but well beggars can't be choosers. And if I remember what started all these posts on OS News, it was someone snagging a U5 on ebay or some such. I might be making that up; but i seem to recall. Anyway, for someone wanting to learn about Sparc, Solaris, OpenBoot, and just plain mess around with something different, it is not a bad place to start. And not caring too much about performance what's it matter if he does it on a U5 or U2, and the U5's come in under the U2's a lot of the time. Ya I'm a baised whore cause that's how I got my U5, but then I can also tell you price was a problem, and when I wanted and UltraSparc to learn about Solaris 8/9 and OpenBoot on I got my hands on a beautiful looks like its fresh out of the U5 for $200. I ear the U10's are flaky, but I don't know I've never used one and cannot say myself, but whatever. I tend to think the U5 is just fine for what he's doing without inserting the 'you're using a cheap loser system' type snobbery.

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: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>

Re:Ultra 5? Oh please no

[dohcvtec]

I installed OpenBSD on my Sparc Station 5 without a hitch, but on my dual CPU ultra2, it paniced...

For one thing, OpenBSD doesn't do SMP (yet) and IIRC it will not function with a second processor present. It's not like other hardware, where if it doesn't recognize it, it just ignores it - I seem to recall that it will panic with more than one processor installed.

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.

Re:Ultra 5? Oh please no

[Octorian]

The U5 and the U10 are the same exact machine. The only difference is the case, PCI riser card, and the CPU speeds they shipped with. The motherboard is identical.

I *hate* OSNews reviews

[Just Some Guy]

Why, oh why, do I keep letting myself be suckered into reading these piles of drivel? I know I'll lose an IQ point every time I do, but I just can't keep from looking.

For example, I have no idea why you would ever not use pkgsrc (or ports) to build packages whenever possible. The reviewer goes on for half a page about his troubles compiling OpenSSL from source. No kidding? That's why we have pkgsrc and ports - someone else has already solved all the little problems for you!

Likewise, he's incredulous that his locally-built package using uber-elite optimization flags runs faster than the downloadable binary package. Frankly, that's like being amazed that a locally-built Debian package may be faster than the generic i386 package that you can download.

I honestly don't know why they label these diatribes as "reviews", when they should be called "a day spent with a system I don't understand".

Re:What's the big deal?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Too bad

[beholder77]

You can download snapshots of more recent source code on it's way to NetBSD 2.0 at ftp://releng.netbsd.org. I've had very positive experiences with the new kernel and userland so far, but YMMV.

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.

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

[PrettyBoy_75]

I ran into the same problem when trying to install FreeBSD on my Ultra 5. Try using CTRL N and CTRL B (or CTRL P... been a while :) ) to navigate.

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:Similar problems

[Octorian]

Actually, I was sorely disappointed with my only recent OpenBSD/sparc64 experience. However, I will say that OpenBSD/sparc runs beautifully.

I had been using an old SPARCstation 5 for something, under OpenBSD, and wanted to upgrade to a more powerful (and rackmount) machine. So I got myself a nice Netra t1 105.

Initially I tried OpenBSD/sparc64 3.3 on it, of course. Well, getting it to work with a mirrored root disk was very painful, and resulted in 30+ minute boot times whenever there was an impropper shutdown. Beyond that, it did work, though the machine was performing much more slowly than I had expected. Furthermore, I had to do some digging and manually apply a kernel patch so that one of the network interfaces wouldn't randomly crap out every once in a while.

Then, given that this box was doing some network stuff, I wanted more ethernet ports beyond the two "hme" controllers built-in. So I picked up a QFE (4-port hme 10/100 NIC) and stuck it in the PCI slot. OpenBSD totally hated that, and I never had any luck getting it to work. Sure it detected the card, but forget about forwarding packets. A friend of mine was using a similar card in his box, though he only had one on-board hme. Only one port on the card worked for him. So I'll guess OpenBSD doesn't like more than 2 hme controllers on a machine.

Eventually I had enough, and just switched the machine over to Solaris 9. I found some good guides for locking it down, and all the software I needed would run on that OS. So after a little bit of effort, I managed to convert the box. It now runs perfectly, all my ethernet ports work, the on-board watchdog timer is supported, and software mirroring of the root disk works painlessly. Oh, and the machine is also performing MUCH faster now.

At this point, I will still say OpenBSD/sparc works wonderfully on the older 32-bit SPARC boxes, but I've lost all faith in the sparc64 port. I'm still eager to see how FreeBSD/sparc64 turns out, though, but right now Solaris just "works better" for all the UltraSPARC machines (and their associated hardware) I have and use.

Platform support

[Octorian]

Honestly, there is nothing special about those machines, beyond that they are just weird PC boxes.

However, it would be nice if open-source OSes did support SGI's real MIPS-based machines a bit better. All the ports I've seen so far do not provide very good support for the hardware beyond the basics. And frankly, if they can't support the graphics hardware, what is even the point of running something other than IRIX?

Another platform I'd like to see support for would be the older microchannel-based non-CHRP IBM RS/6000 machines. They are frankly quite nice boxes, but the only OS they'll run is AIX. (which isn't bad, but tends to confuse hobbyists who aren't multi-platform savvy)