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FreeBSD 5.2.1 On SPARC64
JigSaw writes "FreeBSD has a solid reputation in terms of features and performance on x86, powering sites from Hotmail to Yahoo, yet it doesn't tend to be the first (or even second) OS that comes to mind with many people when thinking of Solaris alternatives for the SPARC platform. Tony Bourke tests FreeBSD 5.2.1 on his SPARC machine."
Just wondering how FreeBSD can call it a full Tier1 support when they dont support older platforms and no video support?
I'm currently running gentoo on my sunblade 100. Since both netbsd and FreeBSD doesnt support video, only serial connections. I had a hella of a time looking for another OS besides Solaris, and Gentoo was the most up2date one I found. SuSE/Redhat dropped support years ago.
I had to drop SuSE, and switch to Gentoo for a newer kernel and true framebuffer support on my Sunblade. Also the binary packages for the Sparc 2004 is done, so you can install a sparc 5/20 without compiling. (I was told sparc-2004 was done last week on #gentoo-sparc on freenode irc network, but have not confirmed it.) Going to put Gentoo on my Sparc 20.
Also, the article shows they tested the 2.4 linux kernel, would be nice to see how 2.6 on sparc performs. I havn't tried 2.6 yet, as its still development on sparc.
I currently run FreeBSD on x86, i'd run it on sparc64 except they don't support Ultra2's (darnit.)
Somebody mentioned the lack of video support, honestly, there is almost 0-market for a GUI on a FreeBSD/sparc64 machine. If someone wants to run FreeBSD on sparc64 hardware, it's most definitely for a server.
Just be happy, FreeBSD 5.2.x is progressing along nicely, and we're getting closer and closer to -STABLE with it.
One thing to remember when using FreeBSD, is that it's mainly a server OS; that can do userland too, but is primarily for servers.
Error 407 - No creative sig found
I put NetBSD on most of my Sparc hardware. Because then I can run and build from the same exact source tree of packages as I use on my Intel boxes. And run a kernel built from exactly the same source.
Which brings up a point: both NetBSD/Sparc and NetBSD/Sparc64 will run on an Ultra 1, which is a 64 bit machine. Why doesn't somebody install each NetBSD port on two seperate Ultra 1 machines. Then the benchmark comparision can be between the normal apps that build on both systems, running in parallel on two identical systems. Its exactly the same codebase except for the 32 or 64 bittedness.
SPARC machines were designed to run Solaris. Solaris is a fine operating system. Solaris can be downloaded for free for SPARC machines. Why would any sane person use anything else on such a machine?
As it seems, that 90% of the trolling today was sent as Anonymous Coward, perhaps disabling anonymous posting completly would make BSD section of slashdot a nice place to discuss again, just like it should be.
Perhaps, without all these troll posts, Slashdot forum could become a good way to exchange information about BSD vs Linux, or just about BSD in general. As you can see, in the quality discussion, that happened here -- perhaps some Sparc64 FreeBSD users will switch to Gentoo if they want video; perhaps some people trying to install Gentoo on displayless Sparcs will try BSD.
That was just 1 article and 3 comments, and it already helped a few people.
Perhaps, BSD people, who post here stories, could get together and send a petition in some form to Rob Malda, as there is not much sense in seiding him individual e-mails. The situation is not too good.
And, to the trolling crowd... well, in general, I really admire the way you're having fun - all that trolling folklore can be really much creative, and sometimes i ROTFLed watching your nonsense replies - all those penisbird ASCIIs, hidden links to goatse, "mod parent down, site is a goatse link" when the parent was 100% good URL - yea, that was trolling, but that was acceptable trolling, if you ask me (well, I like Monthy Python also, why shouldn't I like some of your posts). Anyway, you don't come up with anything fresh. All that "BSD is dying, you don't have to be Kreskin" - man, I've seen that many, many times. Why do you keep repeating this? It's not funny anymore, it's boring. Also, with some filtering it is very easy to cut it out. Another thing - perhaps if you'd spent some time on actually installing & using some of BSD systems a bit, you'd realize, that BSDs - as all operating systems - have their weak points. Perhaps moving the level of trolling frmo nonsense copy-paste to highly specialized flamewar could bring anything new to the table, because now you aren't creative anymore. And non-creative troll is a lame troll, if you ask me. So, I suggest, that you rather come up with something new, or copy-paste "BSD is dying" posts somewhere else - because continuing to do that doesn't impress me much, really.
Just wondering how FreeBSD can call it a full Tier1 support when they dont support older platforms [...]?
Admittedly the lack of SCSI on Ultra-1 and Ultra-2 boxes keeps it off older 64-bit systems for the most part.
and no video support
Are you up to date? The web page claims sunblade 100 fully supported.
...on my Ultra 5. I cringed thinking about loading Solaris on my Ultra 5 when I decided to use it as a syslog server. I looked around, and FreeBSD 5.2 was the latest and seemed to be the greatest for what I needed. Now I need an rsync server at a remote site and guess what I'm loading on the Ultra 10 allocated for that task? Yup, FreeBSD 5.2 - or maybe I'll splurge and download 5.2.1. Now if I could only install easily without using a serial connection.
Lighten up. This is slashdot, not the "I BSD bulliten board".
You must be a real picnic at a party.
I exactly known, what you mean about the ports system. FYI, you don't mean "the port system itself", you just have problems with installation of binary packages.
.tgz or .tbz - that's a bit confusing. You're right. It can be done better, just like the way Debian does that. Debian simply rocks when it comes to binary packages - and I am pretty happy, that it exists, so it showed the way in this area.
;). In fact, it can even be the basic package system on your Slack (and it is available from some time, so you don't have to create another Slackware-packaging-system). Oh, wel.
;)
;) Or, perhaps, noone likes to answer troll comments - but you've got a point with that packaging system, so that's why I bothered ;)
Of course, you can pkg_add http://URL, and it will automatically fetch dependent packages, but the problem is, you need to know the exact url. Package name, package version,
I suppose I will be doing some work in this area with NetBSD packages collection (pkgsrc), but that should be easily portable to FreeBSD and OpenBSD ports. The whole idea is, that if you generate an index file for all binary packages on the site. Information would include the description, requirements, size - pretty much everything found in +* files (+DESCR, +COMMENT, +PLIST and other) - perhaps I could use Berkeley DB format for it. Then, in an user-level utility, you just need to give one URL to fetch that description file (bzipped, of course). Then, such utility could work much like Debian's apt-get and apt-cache - a frontend to pkg_add and a quick way to browse all available, but uninstalled software. We'd have a friendly utility for new users for all BSDs.
Also, as pkgsrc is portable and there are already binary packages avialable for Linux (not to mention NetBSD, of course) from the latest branch of pkgsrc -- we'd just need to add that small utility to bootstrap binary kit for pkgsrc, and you'd have then binary pkgsrc available for your box -- pretty much for all Linux distributions. These are all cool projects, and they can give you perhaps much more, than some Linux distributions (especially those ones, who "lock" user in a maze of incompatible binary packages and their dependencies
And, perhaps, if FreeBSD Ports not impress you, when compared to Gentoo, perhaps you should try then NetBSD packages collection. Maybe the number of operating systems and platforms will somehow impress you, it impress me for sure. Of course, there are bigger and smaller problems, as they always are, in any opensource product, but perhaps with more users activley contributing to the project (just by testing the packages -- that's just using some of your CPU cycles on pkgsrc, instead SETI@Home
BSD? Dead? I don't think so. There's massive active development going on in all areas of each of the BSDs, there are thousands of lines of code shared among developers, lot of new ideas submited, lots of problems solved. There are a lot of companies and sites using it (among others, About.com, Yahoo!, distributed.net, Juniper, NASA)... Check uptime stats on Netcraft itself, FreeBSD rules in the top ten.
Its just perhaps BSD people are usually too busy doing their projects to comment here, so you can get a false impression
Have a nice day!
You don't. Try "pkd_add -r package_name". It will fetch and install package that is appropriate for your FreeBSD architecture and version.
Check uptime stats on Netcraft [netcraft.com] itself, FreeBSD rules in the top ten.
Hate to burst your dellusionary bubble, but up until 2.6, Linux machines would roll over after 497 days. Of course, this fact, which is pointed out time and time again, gets convinently ignored or "forgotten" by BSD zealots.
Read it and weep, BSD troll
BitKeeper confirms, Linux is developed by idiots!
He is not a stupid, he said 90% idle and 10% running, it's interesting for CSI of the real facts.
I think that the trap is due to bad scheduling of I/O (or signals) or is to suspect the fake binary kernel.
...because I only have Sun/Texas Instruments SPARC boxen, no Fujitsus around here I'm afraid.
Oh, I see, they mean SPARCv9. Why couldn't they say so? Given the number of manufacturers who make SPARC processing units it's a bit of a shame that many Open Source projects only claim to support the one manufacturer's chips.
BTW has anyone got any experiences of running this on TI UltraSPARC IV machines that they'd like to share?
Well bug reports anyhow.
CVS log for src/sys/sparc64/sparc64/uio_machdep.c
Revision 1.2 / (download) - annotate - [select for diffs], Sat Apr 3 09:16:26 2004 UTC (2 days, 4 hours ago) by alc
Branch: MAIN
CVS Tags: HEAD
Changes since 1.1: +1 -1 lines
Diff to previous 1.1 (colored)
In some cases, sf_buf_alloc() should sleep with pri PCATCH; in others, it
should not. Add a new parameter so that the caller can specify which is
the case.
Reported by: dillon
I'll go ahead and ask it here since it's mildly on-topic...
Has anyone ever gotten anything to install on a Sun Blade 1500 other than Solaris 8?
I have a brand new Blade1500 sitting next to me at work and it won't even run Solaris 9.
It's a total piece of crap -- Debian won't boot and I couldn't get NetBSD up either.
Sun really put out a piece of work when their own OS won't run on it...
thanks,
davidu
# Hack the planet, it's important.
Wait a moment... rival distributions and lawsuits are a sign of failure. Guess linux is dying too. (SCO, 1 Million and 1 distros...) OK... I know, don't feed the trolls... But this one was amusingly bad.
Boys from the City. Not yet caught by the Whirlwind of Progress. Feed soda pop to the thirsty pigs.