unsigned long geek = random();

It’s quite interesting following the Sun T2000 performance contest. It’s a great marketing plan – generate some buzz about the new server (and the Niagara family of CPUs, and indirectly Solaris 10) by loaning them out for people to benchmark and play with for 60 days. If you publish some good results, you may even get to keep the server.

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.

A few months ago, Steve Rikli sent me a SPARCstation 5 that he no longer had a use for. The machine arrived yesterday and boy was I impressed. Steve went to a lot of effort to make sure the machine was properly packed – it arrived in a very sturdy Cisco box, with inserts to hold the machine in place and plenty of plastic peanuts. In addition, in order to get the machine in the mail to me, Steve also had to suffer multiple trips to the post office because of the vagaries of USPS’s shipping policies and their maximum package sizes.

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

Went by a buddy of mine today to drop off some IRIX CDs and while I was there he passed along two more machines he’d rescued: a DEC Multia and a Sun Ultra 1.

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.


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

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.

After sending this information to various mailing lists over the last few months, I thought I’d add it here for those who don’t rely on the LazyWeb…

The Sun Ultra 5 and Ultra 10 are almost identical. They share the same motherboard, only the PCI backplane and case differ. Unlike most Sun machines of that vintage, they take fairly standard RAM – 168-pin 3.3V ECC EDO DIMMs, common in x86 servers of the time. The motherboard has four slots, but due to the size of the Ultra 5’s case it can typically not take 256MiB DIMMs – unless they’re half height or staggered DIMMs, they won’t fit. Although the Ultra 5 officially supports a maximum of 512MiB RAM, 4×256MiB DIMMs will work fine if they’ll fit.

My one Ultra 5 has 4×128M Compaq DIMMs, bought on eBay for $38, and they work fine (the machine has been rock solid since I added the RAM).

For reference, the RAM is Compaq part number 169234-002, supported by the following servers:

• Proliant 4000
• Proliant 5000
• Proliant 6000 6/200, Model 1
• Proliant 6000 Xeon 6/400, 6/450, and 6/500, Model 1/2S
• Proliant 6500r
• Proliant 7000 6/200 Models 1S/2S
• Proliant 7000 Xeon 6/400, 6/450, and 6/500 Models 1, 1S, 2S