unsigned long geek = random();

On Sunday I finally managed to get OpenSolaris installed on my “spare” Sun Ultra 2. Finally for a number of reasons:

• 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.

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.

For ages now I’ve been trying to installing SunOS 4.1.4 (the last pure BSD-based version), but haven’t had any luck. I’ve tried my CD on three different machines (a SPARCclassic, an Axil 320 and a SPARCstation 10), but each ended up printing garbage to the serial port once the kernel had booted (I access the machines via serial console, using minicom or cu). I eventually figured it out (after some judicious Googling) – the installer assumes the serial console is using 7 bit, even parity. Gaaah!

With the correct serial port settings, I now get the following:

What would you like to do?
  1 - install SunOS mini-root
  2 - exit to single user shell
Enter a 1 or 2:

Damn, why doesn’t it say “Greetings Professor Falken”?

Note to self – stop playing with 10 year old operating systems.