Care of the geeks list, I see that AOpen sell SPARC notebooks. Very interesting. I’m guessing that Rectron, our local AOpen distributor, won’t be stocking ‘em any time soon though 
New York City BSD Users’ Group have put a number of their talks online in mp3 format and a number of them make for great listening. One of my favourites (and particularly relevant in light of yesterday’s post on the subject) is Michael Shalayeff’s talk about porting OpenBSD to PA-RISC . Grab it here.
For the past few days I’ve needed an OpenBSD machine to test some IPSec code I’m busy working on (more on that in a few days). At Jonathan’s suggestion, I toyed with using a VMware virtual machine, but this morning decided to use a spare HP B132L I have lying around instead. Unfortunately NetBSD‘s hp700 port is not yet production-ready, so the machine had been running HP-UX 10.20. It’s a fairly nice mid-90s vintage machine – 133Mhz PA-7300 PA-RISC CPU, 64MiB RAM, 4GiB IBM narrow SCSI drive and Visualize-EG graphics. It could do with a bit more RAM, but 64MiB is more than adequate for my purposes.
Getting OpenBSD/hppa installed was pretty easy, but I managed to trip myself up a few times along the way:
To network boot the machine it was simply a matter of configuring my DHCP server to tell the HP to load the LIF image served by my tftp server. About half and hour after booting the installer I had an OpenBSD/hppa 3.8 machine on my network.
For those who enjoy such things, here’s the dmesg output.
After trying unsuccesfully to trade it to a friend a few months ago, yesterday I decided to fire up my AlphaServer 2100. It’s not a high-spec machine, with only a single 190Mhz EV4 CPU (the other CPU board failed a few months ago), 512MiB RAM and half a dozen 2GiB drives on a DAC960, but I thought it would be nice to at least get NetBSD installed on it.
I dug out a known-working NetBSD/alpha 3.0 CD and after a bit of fiddling, got the bootloader to load and uncompress the kernel. After decompressing, the machine appeared to hang. After waiting a few minutes, I hit the reset button, at which point things took a turn for the worse… The LCD status panel stopped displaying anything and the monitor connected to the VGA display remained blank. The fans were spinning, the disks had spun up and the network card LED was lit. I power-cycled the machine – same result. After reseating all the cards and even running the machine open for a brief period to look for status LEDs inside (didn’t spot any), I decided to hit Google.
I seems as if a few people have had the same problem, most notably Zoon PHAM (see this mail to Tru64 UNIX Managers), but no-one seems to have any possible solutions. This is rather disappointing – this is the only Alpha I own (although I currently have an AlphaServer 800 on loan, a machine that has rekindled my interest in Alphas), and they’re not particularly easy to come by here in South Africa.
Apple are running a trade-in scheme in South Africa – they’re offering discounts on new hardware for those who hand in their old Mac or PIII-or newer PC hardware. They also offer 75% of the discount amount if you want to keep the old machine. I’m not quite sure how they plan on collecting the old hardware if you order from the online store though…
For more info on the offer and the discounts available, see http://www.tradein.co.za/. The offer runs from February 15, 2006 until March 31, 2006 – see the Terms and Conditions for all the fine print and legalese.
I have an Axil 320 (a SPARCstation 20 clone) with a pair of 60Mhz SM61 SuperSPARC CPUs that was never very stable running NetBSD 2.x (both 2.0.x and 2.1.x). It would run for 10-15 days and then halt to the PROM, without a backtrace. Naturally I suspected a hardware problem, and suspected it was disk related (the disk is connected via a wide-to-narrow SCSI converter).
I’ve since upgraded the machine to 3.0_STABLE (as part of my upgrade orgy) and it’s now been up for 37 days. This week I noticed a few of these in the system log:
cpu0: NMI: system interrupts: 10000000
memory error:
EFSR: 9d01<ce ,DW=0,SYNDROME=9d>
MBus transaction: 8fffcd30<vah =0,TYPE=3,SIZE=5,C,VA=ff,S,MID=8>
address: 0x0101bb060
module location: J0202
It seems the machine has a faulty DSIMM (in slot J0202) – more than likely the cause of the crashes. Sadly I’ve been having a bit of bad luck with 200-pin DSIMMs lately (had a faulty one in my SPARCstation 10 a few weeks ago).
I’m writing this more as a reminder to myself than for any other reason – changes have been committed to the NetBSD sparc64 bootloader requiring a bootloader upgrade in order to boot new kernels. To quote from Martin Husemann:
A few days ago Dennis commited changes in the protocol between bootloader
and kernel. I think we forgot to warn you:YOU NEED TO INSTALL A NEW /ofwboot NOW!
The new version will deal with old kernels just fine, but new kernels can
not be booted by the old ofwboot.
Of course, what are the odds I’ll remember this when I build and install a new kernel? I’m still using an old bootloader from July with a fairly freshly minted 3.99.15 on my sparc64 workstation.
[p5] mj@tesla:~$ uname -a
NetBSD tesla.pimp.org.za 3.99.15 NetBSD 3.99.15 (TESLA_3.99) #0: Mon Jan 23 23:14:09 SAST 2006 root@tesla.pimp.org.za:/usr/obj/sys/compile/TESLA_3.99 sparc64
[p5] mj@tesla:~$ ls -l /ofwboot
-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 62254 Jul 19 2005 /ofwboot
About eight months ago I gave Jonathan his first Sun workstation, a SPARCstation 1+. The poor machine had no disk, 16MiB RAM and a dead PROM. Jonathan revived the machine by sawing the old battery off the PROM, hooking up some new ones and putting in another 16MiB RAM. At my suggestion, he installed NetBSD on it.
Sadly, the poor machine seems to have died another death in the last week. It no longer boots up properly, instead printing the following on the console:
Unknown device in Sbus slot#1
Unknown device in Sbus slot#2
The odd thing is that the machine doesn’t have anything in SBus slot 2, only a cgsix in SBus slot 1. Some judicious investigation (read: Googling) suggests that the PROM may have become corrupted and that the solution is to boot the machine without the PROM, insert the PROM with the machine on and clear the settings. After my bad experience replacing the PROM on a SPARCstation 20 (which left me with a machine that doesn’t even boot to the PROM), I’ve decided to let Jonathan do this one himself 
Will update this story with the results once he’s tried it.
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