Something odd that we’ve both noticed is that when we put a 450Mhz CPU into a machine that we didn’t receive with a 450Mhz CPU, it wouldn’t boot up. There’s no mention of CPU speed jumpers in the service manual, so we both put it down to different motherboard revisions, phases of the moon and the lack of a chicken sacrifice.

A few days ago I discovered the Sun 450 MHz UltraSPARC-II Module Upgrade guide, which details the CPU speed jumper settings for the Ultra 60 (see pages 3-5 and 3-6). Bah. Why doesn’t Sun bother documenting these things in the service manual?

My boot server is running NetBSD 3.1 and I booted FreeBSD 6.2, so if you’re using different software you may need to make some adjustments. YMMV.

1. On the boot server, configure rarpd(8) as usual, adding the entry for your machine’s MAC address to /etc/ethers. For example (for a machine called test02):
   08:00:20:b2:2f:b6 test02
2. Extract the FreeBSD base fileset to the appropriate location on your boot server (for example, /export/install/fb62_sp64).
3. Extract the FreeBSD GENERIC kernel fileset to boot/ in your diskless filesystem.
4. Within your diskless root, symlink boot/GENERIC to boot/kernel (boot/GENERIC is a directory that contains the kernel and its modules).
5. Put boot/loaders from the diskless filesystem into your tftp root directory and symlink it to your machine’s IP address in hex. For example, the filename for 192.168.1.92 is C0A8015C.
6. Export your diskless root filesystem via NFS and add the necessary dhcpd.conf stanza. For example:
host test02.pimp.org.za {
hardware ethernet 08:00:20:b2:2f:b6;
fixed-address 192.168.1.92;
option host-name "test02";
option root-path "/export/install/fb62_sp64";
}
7. Boot your machine – “boot net” from the PROM should do it.

A few tips:

• It’s normally a good idea to update the machine’s OpenBoot PROM to the latest release. Old PROMs often have subtle bugs.
• Extracting FreeBSD filesets is simple:
cat 6.2-RELEASE/base/base.* > /tmp/base.tar.gz
tar -xzvpf /tmp/base.tar.gz -C /export/install/fb62_sp4


Update: Fixed incorrect command to extract sets (thanks John Messenger!)

My plan is to put together at least two dual CPU machines, one running FreeBSD and another probably running OpenSolaris. *sigh* If only NetBSD supported SMP on 64-bit SPARC systems.

One of the Ultra 60s had a single 360Mhz CPU, 1GiB RAM, a 9GiB disk, gigabit Ethernet and a pair of Creator3Ds. The other had a single 360Mhz CPU, 512MiB RAM, a pair of 18GiB drives and a single Creator3D. The Ultra 2 only had a single 200Mhz CPU, but had 512MiB RAM. The Ultra 1s were pretty low end – both had 143Mhz CPUs, 64MiB RAM and a quad fast ethernet and one had a 2GiB disk, the other being diskless.

I’ve given the one Ultra 60 and the Ultra 2 to Jonathan Groll and the Ultra 1s will probably be given to some deserving homes amongst CLUG members. My Ultra 60 is already running NetBSD-current (currently 4.99.4 kernel and userland) and working well, but more on that in a later post.

It’s incredible, but a few years ago it was impossible to get any moderately decent Sun hardware locally, but these days it seems to be falling from the sky. At rough count I currently have 13 unused Sun machines (6×32-bit, 7×64-bit). Now I just need to get myself a nice Blade 1000, 2000 or 2500 and I’ll be a very happy camper. Of course NetBSD still needs to get working sparc64 SMP and UltraSPARC-III CPU support, but that’s minor stuff

• It took me a while to get the machine back together again with a working disk and the correct RAM. 200-pin DSIMMs are not the easiest things to add and remove.
• I have a distinct shortage of decent sized 1″ SCA disks. I eventually found a 7,200rpm 9GiB Western Digital drive that used to be in my AlphaServer 800 and used that.
• I needed to update the PROM to boot a 64-bit kernel, which took some time as I had to hunt down a hard disk with Solaris already installed in order to boot the PROM updater.
• Solaris is not quick to install using a 12x CD-ROM drive (the fastest I had at hand – didn’t feel like digging in the parts bin outside for a faster one).
• Slicing the disk incorrectly is not a Good Thing – the first install failed after /usr ran out of space.

After all that:
[1] mj@skunkworks:~$ uname -a
SunOS skunkworks 5.11 snv_52 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2


Not the fastest machine (single 300Mhz UltraSPARC-II CPU, 512MiB RAM), but it runs well.

The two systems I got were an Ultra 10, 333Mhz, 256MiB, 9GiB IDE, Creator3D and an Ultra 2, 300Mhz, 256MiB, Creator3D and no disks. I’ve already stripped my Ultra 5 and put its RAM, SCSI controller, disk and USB 2.0 card into the Ultra 10 and it seems noticeably faster – probably a combination of the Creator3D and the extra cache on the 333Mhz CPU (2MiB vs the 256KiB on the Ultra 5’s 360Mhz).

The Ultra 10 is running NetBSD-current (4.99.1) and once Solaris 10 Update 3 has been released, I’ll be installing it on the Ultra 2.

Some judicious Googling suggested that it could be a heat problem, so on the weekend I stripped the machine down and cleaned it out. It was full of dust – a thick layer on the power supply and over the CPUs’ heat sinks. After the cleanout, the machine has been rock solid – I’ve rebuilt a lot of pkgsrc packages and put it under a fair load and it hasn’t skipped a beat.

Some early articles I’ve read:

• Colm MacCárthaigh
• Robert Milkowski

I’d be very curious to see how an enterprise application like SAP ERP or a database like DB2 perform on the T2000. While not applications that one may traditionally associate with a highly threaded, multi-core CPU, I’m sure they’d see similar performance boosts to those seen by web applications. Certainly, any SAP-based application server, with its virtualization of the operating system processes into work processes, would benefit. It’s just a pity the competition and trial offer aren’t available in South Africa.

Something that pleases me about this – it shows Sun’s continued commitment to the SPARC architecture. With their punting of Opteron-based servers of late, I was beginning to fear for the continued survival of what is probably my favourite CPU family.

The machine itself is a very nice one: 170Mhz TurboSPARC CPU, 256MiB RAM, 73GiB Fujitsu HD, CD-ROM, cgsix, SunVideo and quad ethernet. He also tossed an SBus Fast Ethernet/wide SCSI adapter in the box. Thanks Steve!

For those interested, here is the dmesg output. Of course, it runs NetBSD

The Multia is a low-end machine (my one has a 166Mhz Alpha CPU, 24MiB RAM and a 350MiB 2.5″ SCSI drive), but it’s still pretty neat. The small size, two PCMCIA slots and single PCI slot can make it into quite a neat wireless access point or broadband router. I’m having a little difficulty getting the SRM console to display on my el-cheapo test monitor (ARC works fine), but I’ll dig out a better monitor for testing tomorrow and then try and boot NetBSD on it.

The Ultra 1 (these things seem to be falling from the sky these days) is a non-E model with a dead CPU fan and no disks. The case is in good shape though and I think it should be pretty easy to get it into working order.

Ultra 1 PROM banner (note the ancient version!):
Sun Ultra 1 SBus (UltraSPARC 167MHz), No Keyboard
OpenBoot 3.0, 128 MB memory installed, Serial #7999316.
Ethernet address 8:0:20:7a:f:54, Host ID: 807a0f54.


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).

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


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.