[OpenIndiana-discuss] oi or hipster for ultra5?

[Jacob Ritorto]

Hi,
My Solaris 11 install is getting a little long in the tooth and I still
use this poor old machine kind of a lot for small development, pdp11
emulation and its real serial ports, etc. I would like to keep it because
it's pretty low power, reliable as dirt, and still supports the very
comfortable Sun type 4 unix keyboard, which I still feel a little paralyzed
trying to do without. I'm running into problems with new software (CSW, in
particular) wanting more recent libs than the OS has. So I guess (*sigh*)
it's time to update the OS bits.

Is it feasible to install Hipster or OI on such a meagerly appointed
machine? I don't even have a dvd player; just cd.

SunOS beep 5.11 snv_65 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-5_10
Memory size: 256 Megabytes

thx
jake

[Andrew Gabriel]

Post by Jacob Ritorto
Hi,
My Solaris 11 install is getting a little long in the tooth and I still
use this poor old machine kind of a lot for small development, pdp11
emulation and its real serial ports, etc. I would like to keep it because
it's pretty low power, reliable as dirt, and still supports the very
comfortable Sun type 4 unix keyboard, which I still feel a little paralyzed
trying to do without. I'm running into problems with new software (CSW, in
particular) wanting more recent libs than the OS has. So I guess (*sigh*)
it's time to update the OS bits.
Is it feasible to install Hipster or OI on such a meagerly appointed
machine? I don't even have a dvd player; just cd.
SunOS beep 5.11 snv_65 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-5_10
Memory size: 256 Megabytes

An Ultra 5 is a SPARC system.
No one builds OpenIndiana for SPARC.

The two Illumos distributions for SPARC that I know of are OpenSXCE and
Tribblix.

Another option would be to use Solaris 11 Express if it still exists
anywhere - it's old, but not as old as snv_65. I think it still had
sun4u support, but I could be mistaken. Solaris 11 itself no longer
supports sun4u systems except the Sun/Fujitsu M-series
(M3000/4000/5000/8000/9000).

Do you have to stick with SPARC? Your Ultra 5 is going to be way slower
than any current (and many old) x86 systems, which are supported by all
the Illumos distributions.

[Alan Coopersmith]

Another option would be to use Solaris 11 Express if it still exists anywhere -
it's old, but not as old as snv_65. I think it still had sun4u support, but I
could be mistaken.

I don't think it's still available, but yes, Solaris 11 Express 2010.11 (aka
snv_151, a build 3.5 years newer that snv_65 from May 2007) did have sun4u
support still. They didn't stop booting until snv_163, which only went to
customers in the private beta, not a public release.

-alan-

[Daniel Kjar]

I have a blade 1000 with 2x1.2ghz ultrasparc iv+ or something like that
and 8 gbs of ram with the top of the line video card. It still suffers
under openscxe or whatever that is called. Definitely usable but not if
there are any other options.

If anyone is in upstate ny and you would like to adopt that old monster
just let me know, you will have to pick it up though...



-----Original Message-----
From: Alan Coopersmith [mailto:***@oracle.com]
Sent: Sunday, February 1, 2015 2:58 PM
To: Discussion list for OpenIndiana
Subject: Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] oi or hipster for ultra5?

Post by Andrew Gabriel
Another option would be to use Solaris 11 Express if it still exists
anywhere - it's old, but not as old as snv_65. I think it still had
sun4u support, but I could be mistaken.

I don't think it's still available, but yes, Solaris 11 Express 2010.11
(aka snv_151, a build 3.5 years newer that snv_65 from May 2007) did have
sun4u support still. They didn't stop booting until snv_163, which only
went to customers in the private beta, not a public release.

-alan-

[Jacob Ritorto]

Post by Andrew Gabriel
Do you have to stick with SPARC? Your Ultra 5 is going to be way slower
than any current (and many old) x86 systems, which are supported by all the
Illumos distributions.

I don't have to; it's just that I have a number of these good old machines
around and they're quite adequate for what I'm working on. OpenBSD seems
to still support them, so maybe I'll give that a go.

thanks
jake

[Andrew Gabriel]

Post by Jacob Ritorto

Post by Andrew Gabriel
Do you have to stick with SPARC? Your Ultra 5 is going to be way slower
than any current (and many old) x86 systems, which are supported by all the
Illumos distributions.

I don't have to; it's just that I have a number of these good old machines
around and they're quite adequate for what I'm working on. OpenBSD seems
to still support them, so maybe I'll give that a go.

Sure, but before spending much time on them, do bare in mind they are
about same performance as a 15-20 year old Pentium II system.

You could probably move all their workloads to a single current x86
system, and have loads of CPU capacity left over, and consume less power
than a single Ultra 5.

[Jacob Ritorto]

Well, true, but while I'm pretty pleased with and interested in helping
with Illumos et al, I'm just not that interested in owning a pc. I have
quite a number of SPARC machines and I'm fine with the performance of the
thing - this isn't a processor-intensive load, as you might imagine.

Post by Andrew Gabriel

On Sun, Feb 1, 2015 at 2:19 PM, Andrew Gabriel <

Post by Andrew Gabriel
Do you have to stick with SPARC? Your Ultra 5 is going to be way slower
than any current (and many old) x86 systems, which are supported by all the
Illumos distributions.

I don't have to; it's just that I have a number of these good old machines
around and they're quite adequate for what I'm working on. OpenBSD seems
to still support them, so maybe I'll give that a go.

Sure, but before spending much time on them, do bare in mind they are
about same performance as a 15-20 year old Pentium II system.
You could probably move all their workloads to a single current x86
system, and have loads of CPU capacity left over, and consume less power
than a single Ultra 5.
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[Jerry Kemp]

Sure, but before spending much time on them, do bare in mind they are about same
performance as a 15-20 year old Pentium II system.
You could probably move all their workloads to a single current x86 system, and
have loads of CPU capacity left over, and consume less power than a single Ultra 5.

How would the OP be able to use his RISC binaries? Or utilize his Sun Type 4
keyboard?

It seems like a move to x86 might introduce more problems than it would solve.

Jerry

[Jacob Ritorto]

Going to recompile the bins on bsd.
Absolutely LOVING the keyboard. Gosh, I missed that thing.

Otherwise, yeah, don't need a pc here. I admit that I'm a little nervy
about the bsd learning curve, but, hey - it's a nice thing to pick up along
the way.

Post by Andrew Gabriel
Sure, but before spending much time on them, do bare in mind they are

Post by Andrew Gabriel
about same
performance as a 15-20 year old Pentium II system.
You could probably move all their workloads to a single current x86 system, and
have loads of CPU capacity left over, and consume less power than a single Ultra 5.

How would the OP be able to use his RISC binaries? Or utilize his Sun
Type 4 keyboard?
It seems like a move to x86 might introduce more problems than it would solve.
Jerry
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[David Brodbeck]

Post by Jacob Ritorto
Going to recompile the bins on bsd.
Absolutely LOVING the keyboard. Gosh, I missed that thing.
Otherwise, yeah, don't need a pc here. I admit that I'm a little nervy
about the bsd learning curve, but, hey - it's a nice thing to pick up along
the way.

I suspect you'll pick it up pretty easily if you have any past experience
with SunOS 4, which was based on 4.3 BSD. Non-SYSV init scripts may trip
you up a little, although FreeBSD has been moving to an "almost SYSV" sort
of setup with /etc/rc.d and /usr/local/etc/rc.d directories; dunno if
OpenBSD has followed suit. In general the *BSD distributions tend to be
very well documented, both online and inside the OS.

[Jacob Ritorto]

Well, you were right; however, after spending the day with the bsds, I have
to conclude: They're nice; they're snappy, but they're no OpenSolaris / OI
/ Hipster in terms of overall usability, features and stability. We really
do have an awesome thing going over here. Just need it to be smaller ;)

Post by David Brodbeck

Post by Jacob Ritorto
Going to recompile the bins on bsd.
Absolutely LOVING the keyboard. Gosh, I missed that thing.
Otherwise, yeah, don't need a pc here. I admit that I'm a little nervy
about the bsd learning curve, but, hey - it's a nice thing to pick up

along

Post by Jacob Ritorto
the way.

I suspect you'll pick it up pretty easily if you have any past experience
with SunOS 4, which was based on 4.3 BSD. Non-SYSV init scripts may trip
you up a little, although FreeBSD has been moving to an "almost SYSV" sort
of setup with /etc/rc.d and /usr/local/etc/rc.d directories; dunno if
OpenBSD has followed suit. In general the *BSD distributions tend to be
very well documented, both online and inside the OS.
_______________________________________________
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[Peter Tribble]

Post by Jacob Ritorto
Is it feasible to install Hipster or OI on such a meagerly appointed
machine? I don't even have a dvd player; just cd.
SunOS beep 5.11 snv_65 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-5_10
Memory size: 256 Megabytes

That's a sparc box. You aren't going to be able to run OI
(any version, including hipster) or most of the illumos distros.

You've really got 2 options. OpenSXCE or Tribblix.

http://www.opensxce.org/
http://www.tribblix.org/download.html

Now, the Tribblix iso should fit on a CD. (Although to be
honest that's largely accidental as I haven't built most
of the packages for sparc yet.) As should the OpenSXCE
text iso.

The really hard part is going to be booting the CD in that
small amount of memory. The root archive on the Tribblix
iso is currently 200M, and that gets loaded into memory -
you really don't have any space left to breathe. (I don't
know offhand how big the OpenSXCE boot archive is,
but it's likely to be pretty similar.)

This isn't a truly fundamental problem - the root archive
ends up being pretty large because it has support for
everything in it by default, and it should be possible to
produce a custom iso with a much smaller root archive.
One of the things I'm interested in is minimal-footprint
configurations, so doing that (and any other work to
improve efficiency and reduce the footprint) is on my
agenda, but it's going to take time. (And it's difficult
for me to test, as I don't personally have any sparc
hardware left that's that old or small. On x86 I think
I managed to boot a custom iso in 400M and run in 256M,
but there I can fiddle the settings in a VirtualBox VM.)

Another way would be to use the existing OS to install
a newer distro in an alternate boot environment.

In any event, you're likely to be in for a modest amount
of work and you're off into the weeds; the population of
illumos users working on sparc is pretty small.

[Jacob Ritorto]

Hmm, yeah, Tribblix sounds like a great option for my purposes. Is there X
support? That'd be nice so I can free up the other serial port. (Trying
to simultaneously run a serial console to the pdp11 as well as an emulated
tu58 drive via the other serial port.) I think I'll give it a whirl.
OpenBSD can boot from floppy and install via Internet, so that's great, but
I can't seem to find any floppies that'll still format. This is heck-of
retro :)

thx
jake

Post by Peter Tribble

Post by Jacob Ritorto
Is it feasible to install Hipster or OI on such a meagerly appointed
machine? I don't even have a dvd player; just cd.
SunOS beep 5.11 snv_65 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-5_10
Memory size: 256 Megabytes

That's a sparc box. You aren't going to be able to run OI
(any version, including hipster) or most of the illumos distros.
You've really got 2 options. OpenSXCE or Tribblix.
http://www.opensxce.org/
http://www.tribblix.org/download.html
Now, the Tribblix iso should fit on a CD. (Although to be
honest that's largely accidental as I haven't built most
of the packages for sparc yet.) As should the OpenSXCE
text iso.
The really hard part is going to be booting the CD in that
small amount of memory. The root archive on the Tribblix
iso is currently 200M, and that gets loaded into memory -
you really don't have any space left to breathe. (I don't
know offhand how big the OpenSXCE boot archive is,
but it's likely to be pretty similar.)
This isn't a truly fundamental problem - the root archive
ends up being pretty large because it has support for
everything in it by default, and it should be possible to
produce a custom iso with a much smaller root archive.
One of the things I'm interested in is minimal-footprint
configurations, so doing that (and any other work to
improve efficiency and reduce the footprint) is on my
agenda, but it's going to take time. (And it's difficult
for me to test, as I don't personally have any sparc
hardware left that's that old or small. On x86 I think
I managed to boot a custom iso in 400M and run in 256M,
but there I can fiddle the settings in a VirtualBox VM.)
Another way would be to use the existing OS to install
a newer distro in an alternate boot environment.
In any event, you're likely to be in for a modest amount
of work and you're off into the weeds; the population of
illumos users working on sparc is pretty small.
--
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
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http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss

[Jacob Ritorto]

tribblix dies a few seconds after starting to boot with
Loading: /platform/SUNW,Ultra-5_10/boot_archive
Loading: /platform/sun4u/boot_archive

Can't open boot_archive
Fast Data Access MMU Miss


Bummer.

Thanks very much, nonetheless, for keeping SPARC in mind, Peter!

Post by Jacob Ritorto
Hmm, yeah, Tribblix sounds like a great option for my purposes. Is there
X support? That'd be nice so I can free up the other serial port. (Trying
to simultaneously run a serial console to the pdp11 as well as an emulated
tu58 drive via the other serial port.) I think I'll give it a whirl.
OpenBSD can boot from floppy and install via Internet, so that's great, but
I can't seem to find any floppies that'll still format. This is heck-of
retro :)
thx
jake

Post by Peter Tribble

Post by Jacob Ritorto
Is it feasible to install Hipster or OI on such a meagerly appointed
machine? I don't even have a dvd player; just cd.
SunOS beep 5.11 snv_65 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-5_10
Memory size: 256 Megabytes

That's a sparc box. You aren't going to be able to run OI
(any version, including hipster) or most of the illumos distros.
You've really got 2 options. OpenSXCE or Tribblix.
http://www.opensxce.org/
http://www.tribblix.org/download.html
Now, the Tribblix iso should fit on a CD. (Although to be
honest that's largely accidental as I haven't built most
of the packages for sparc yet.) As should the OpenSXCE
text iso.
The really hard part is going to be booting the CD in that
small amount of memory. The root archive on the Tribblix
iso is currently 200M, and that gets loaded into memory -
you really don't have any space left to breathe. (I don't
know offhand how big the OpenSXCE boot archive is,
but it's likely to be pretty similar.)
This isn't a truly fundamental problem - the root archive
ends up being pretty large because it has support for
everything in it by default, and it should be possible to
produce a custom iso with a much smaller root archive.
One of the things I'm interested in is minimal-footprint
configurations, so doing that (and any other work to
improve efficiency and reduce the footprint) is on my
agenda, but it's going to take time. (And it's difficult
for me to test, as I don't personally have any sparc
hardware left that's that old or small. On x86 I think
I managed to boot a custom iso in 400M and run in 256M,
but there I can fiddle the settings in a VirtualBox VM.)
Another way would be to use the existing OS to install
a newer distro in an alternate boot environment.
In any event, you're likely to be in for a modest amount
of work and you're off into the weeds; the population of
illumos users working on sparc is pretty small.
--
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
_______________________________________________
openindiana-discuss mailing list
http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss

[Peter Tribble]

Post by Jacob Ritorto
tribblix dies a few seconds after starting to boot with
Loading: /platform/SUNW,Ultra-5_10/boot_archive
Loading: /platform/sun4u/boot_archive
Can't open boot_archive
Fast Data Access MMU Miss

Hey, thanks for testing (and the bug report...)!

You did read the bit about "experimental", "works for me", and "only
tested on a T5140"? There's a reason those caveats apply, it hasn't
seen much testing outside my single lab box. It was only at the end of
last week that I burnt an actual iso and did a physical boot (as opposed
to running an LDOM off the iso image file).

So this is both encouraging and discouraging. The ISO is valid (that's the
good bit) but doesn't have a boot archive it can find. OK, I can add a
symlink to get around that particular error in the build.

You're still going to have the problem that the boot archive is too large.
I'm currently down to a 172M archive rather than 200M, but that's
really going to have to get down to ~100M before booting on a 256M
machine is viable. I can just about see how to get down to 120M,
but it's going to get more interesting beyond that.

Post by Jacob Ritorto
Bummer.
Thanks very much, nonetheless, for keeping SPARC in mind, Peter!

Post by Jacob Ritorto
Hmm, yeah, Tribblix sounds like a great option for my purposes. Is there
X support? That'd be nice so I can free up the other serial port.

(Trying

Post by Jacob Ritorto
to simultaneously run a serial console to the pdp11 as well as an

emulated

Post by Jacob Ritorto
tu58 drive via the other serial port.) I think I'll give it a whirl.
OpenBSD can boot from floppy and install via Internet, so that's great,

but

Post by Jacob Ritorto
I can't seem to find any floppies that'll still format. This is heck-of
retro :)
thx
jake

Post by Peter Tribble

Post by Jacob Ritorto
Is it feasible to install Hipster or OI on such a meagerly appointed
machine? I don't even have a dvd player; just cd.
SunOS beep 5.11 snv_65 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-5_10
Memory size: 256 Megabytes

That's a sparc box. You aren't going to be able to run OI
(any version, including hipster) or most of the illumos distros.
You've really got 2 options. OpenSXCE or Tribblix.
http://www.opensxce.org/
http://www.tribblix.org/download.html
Now, the Tribblix iso should fit on a CD. (Although to be
honest that's largely accidental as I haven't built most
of the packages for sparc yet.) As should the OpenSXCE
text iso.
The really hard part is going to be booting the CD in that
small amount of memory. The root archive on the Tribblix
iso is currently 200M, and that gets loaded into memory -
you really don't have any space left to breathe. (I don't
know offhand how big the OpenSXCE boot archive is,
but it's likely to be pretty similar.)
This isn't a truly fundamental problem - the root archive
ends up being pretty large because it has support for
everything in it by default, and it should be possible to
produce a custom iso with a much smaller root archive.
One of the things I'm interested in is minimal-footprint
configurations, so doing that (and any other work to
improve efficiency and reduce the footprint) is on my
agenda, but it's going to take time. (And it's difficult
for me to test, as I don't personally have any sparc
hardware left that's that old or small. On x86 I think
I managed to boot a custom iso in 400M and run in 256M,
but there I can fiddle the settings in a VirtualBox VM.)
Another way would be to use the existing OS to install
a newer distro in an alternate boot environment.
In any event, you're likely to be in for a modest amount
of work and you're off into the weeds; the population of
illumos users working on sparc is pretty small.
--
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
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openindiana-discuss mailing list
http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss

_______________________________________________
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http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss

[Jacob Ritorto]

You're welcome. I got even more curious and am starting to play with
FreeBSD too. Actually got the old jumpstart-style rarp/bootp/tftp/nfs
install thing working since I ran out of CDs in the wee hours of the
morning :\ It actually worked great.

I've quite a few SPARC machines ranging from SPARC 2 to SPARC 10 to Ultra
1& 2& 5 to T1000&2000 around if I can help out with further Tribblix
testing or maybe a little dev.

--jake

Post by Peter Tribble

Post by Jacob Ritorto
tribblix dies a few seconds after starting to boot with
Loading: /platform/SUNW,Ultra-5_10/boot_archive
Loading: /platform/sun4u/boot_archive
Can't open boot_archive
Fast Data Access MMU Miss

Hey, thanks for testing (and the bug report...)!
You did read the bit about "experimental", "works for me", and "only
tested on a T5140"? There's a reason those caveats apply, it hasn't
seen much testing outside my single lab box. It was only at the end of
last week that I burnt an actual iso and did a physical boot (as opposed
to running an LDOM off the iso image file).
So this is both encouraging and discouraging. The ISO is valid (that's the
good bit) but doesn't have a boot archive it can find. OK, I can add a
symlink to get around that particular error in the build.
You're still going to have the problem that the boot archive is too large.
I'm currently down to a 172M archive rather than 200M, but that's
really going to have to get down to ~100M before booting on a 256M
machine is viable. I can just about see how to get down to 120M,
but it's going to get more interesting beyond that.

Post by Jacob Ritorto
Bummer.
Thanks very much, nonetheless, for keeping SPARC in mind, Peter!

Post by Jacob Ritorto
Hmm, yeah, Tribblix sounds like a great option for my purposes. Is

there

Post by Jacob Ritorto

Post by Jacob Ritorto
X support? That'd be nice so I can free up the other serial port.

(Trying

Post by Jacob Ritorto
to simultaneously run a serial console to the pdp11 as well as an

emulated

Post by Jacob Ritorto
tu58 drive via the other serial port.) I think I'll give it a whirl.
OpenBSD can boot from floppy and install via Internet, so that's great,

but

Post by Jacob Ritorto
I can't seem to find any floppies that'll still format. This is

heck-of

Post by Jacob Ritorto

Post by Jacob Ritorto
retro :)
thx
jake

Post by Peter Tribble

Post by Jacob Ritorto
Is it feasible to install Hipster or OI on such a meagerly

appointed

Post by Jacob Ritorto

Post by Jacob Ritorto

Post by Peter Tribble

Post by Jacob Ritorto
machine? I don't even have a dvd player; just cd.
SunOS beep 5.11 snv_65 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-5_10
Memory size: 256 Megabytes

That's a sparc box. You aren't going to be able to run OI
(any version, including hipster) or most of the illumos distros.
You've really got 2 options. OpenSXCE or Tribblix.
http://www.opensxce.org/
http://www.tribblix.org/download.html
Now, the Tribblix iso should fit on a CD. (Although to be
honest that's largely accidental as I haven't built most
of the packages for sparc yet.) As should the OpenSXCE
text iso.
The really hard part is going to be booting the CD in that
small amount of memory. The root archive on the Tribblix
iso is currently 200M, and that gets loaded into memory -
you really don't have any space left to breathe. (I don't
know offhand how big the OpenSXCE boot archive is,
but it's likely to be pretty similar.)
This isn't a truly fundamental problem - the root archive
ends up being pretty large because it has support for
everything in it by default, and it should be possible to
produce a custom iso with a much smaller root archive.
One of the things I'm interested in is minimal-footprint
configurations, so doing that (and any other work to
improve efficiency and reduce the footprint) is on my
agenda, but it's going to take time. (And it's difficult
for me to test, as I don't personally have any sparc
hardware left that's that old or small. On x86 I think
I managed to boot a custom iso in 400M and run in 256M,
but there I can fiddle the settings in a VirtualBox VM.)
Another way would be to use the existing OS to install
a newer distro in an alternate boot environment.
In any event, you're likely to be in for a modest amount
of work and you're off into the weeds; the population of
illumos users working on sparc is pretty small.
--
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
_______________________________________________
openindiana-discuss mailing list
http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss

_______________________________________________
openindiana-discuss mailing list
http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss

--
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
_______________________________________________
openindiana-discuss mailing list
http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss

[Jerry Kemp]

You have taken it a lot further than I would have.

For an Ultra 5 or 10, I probably would not have gone past Solaris 10, and due to
your ram being well under 4 Gb, I would stay on UFS vs ZFS.

When you say "Solaris 11 install" in reference to this box, do you mean an
install of Sun OpenSolaris? Or Oracle Solaris 11 Express? By default, and
beginning with Solaris 11 proper, Oracle Solaris 11 will not install on a Sparc
system unless it is a T series or M series at the low end.

I understand you stating it is a good box, I have an Ultra 10 myself that is
still chugging along, either way, I would take this time to max out the ram on
your system. I believe that the Ultra 5/10 system board will hold 1 Gb of RAM.
It seem that you have quite a few more years planned into your Ultra 5, and it
is available new for reasonable prices, or there are a number of old hardware
support list where I suspect that you could acquire more RAM for the cost of
shipping.

Jerry

Post by Jacob Ritorto
Hi,
My Solaris 11 install is getting a little long in the tooth and I still
use this poor old machine kind of a lot for small development, pdp11
emulation and its real serial ports, etc. I would like to keep it because
it's pretty low power, reliable as dirt, and still supports the very
comfortable Sun type 4 unix keyboard, which I still feel a little paralyzed
trying to do without. I'm running into problems with new software (CSW, in
particular) wanting more recent libs than the OS has. So I guess (*sigh*)
it's time to update the OS bits.
Is it feasible to install Hipster or OI on such a meagerly appointed
machine? I don't even have a dvd player; just cd.
SunOS beep 5.11 snv_65 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-5_10
Memory size: 256 Megabytes
thx
jake
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[Andrew Gabriel]

Post by Jerry Kemp
You have taken it a lot further than I would have.
For an Ultra 5 or 10, I probably would not have gone past Solaris 10,
and due to your ram being well under 4 Gb, I would stay on UFS vs ZFS.
When you say "Solaris 11 install" in reference to this box, do you
mean an install of Sun OpenSolaris?

snv_65 is an early development build of Solaris 11 - actually more like
Solaris 10 than even the earliest Solaris 11 releases.

Post by Jerry Kemp
Or Oracle Solaris 11 Express? By default, and beginning with Solaris
11 proper, Oracle Solaris 11 will not install on a Sparc system unless
it is a T series or M series at the low end.
I understand you stating it is a good box, I have an Ultra 10 myself
that is still chugging along, either way, I would take this time to
max out the ram on your system. I believe that the Ultra 5/10 system
board will hold 1 Gb of RAM. It seem that you have quite a few more
years planned into your Ultra 5, and it is available new for
reasonable prices, or there are a number of old hardware support list
where I suspect that you could acquire more RAM for the cost of shipping.

Max for Ultra 5 was actually 512Mb. The motherboard will take 1Gb and
people have done it, but in theory it exceeds max power draw on one of
the rails and some DIMMs are too tall without taking something out of
the case (floppy disk drive, and/or the never used smart card reader
housing, IIRC).

Also note that the boot code in the Ultra 5/10 is exceedingly slow
reading in the boot archive - it wasn't originally designed for reading
in files of anything like that size, and is very non-optimal when doing
so (takes many minutes).

[Jerry Kemp]

Post by Jerry Kemp
You have taken it a lot further than I would have.
For an Ultra 5 or 10, I probably would not have gone past Solaris 10, and due
to your ram being well under 4 Gb, I would stay on UFS vs ZFS.
When you say "Solaris 11 install" in reference to this box, do you mean an
install of Sun OpenSolaris?

snv_65 is an early development build of Solaris 11 - actually more like Solaris
10 than even the earliest Solaris 11 releases.

yep. Missed that part, and saw it less than 10 minutes after hitting the send
button. Sun OpenSolaris Nevada build 65.

But I still stick by my comments concerning the system RAM. If the OP is
committed to this box, now is probably a great time to max out the memory.
Especially if he wants to move forward beyond OpenSolaris Nevada build 65.

Jerry

[Jacob Ritorto]

Wow. I just put OpenBSD on this thing and it runs like a pup. I'm really
impressed. Is anyone besides Peter working on cruft-cutting and minimal
system distribution of Illumos? If things can be this awesome on 1998
hardware, we really should aspire to this level of KISS, tidiness and
performance in Illumos.

Post by Jerry Kemp

Post by Jerry Kemp
You have taken it a lot further than I would have.
For an Ultra 5 or 10, I probably would not have gone past Solaris 10, and due
to your ram being well under 4 Gb, I would stay on UFS vs ZFS.
When you say "Solaris 11 install" in reference to this box, do you mean an
install of Sun OpenSolaris?

snv_65 is an early development build of Solaris 11 - actually more like Solaris
10 than even the earliest Solaris 11 releases.

yep. Missed that part, and saw it less than 10 minutes after hitting the
send button. Sun OpenSolaris Nevada build 65.
But I still stick by my comments concerning the system RAM. If the OP is
committed to this box, now is probably a great time to max out the memory.
Especially if he wants to move forward beyond OpenSolaris Nevada build 65.
Jerry
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[Peter Tribble]

Post by Jacob Ritorto
Wow. I just put OpenBSD on this thing and it runs like a pup. I'm really
impressed. Is anyone besides Peter working on cruft-cutting and minimal
system distribution of Illumos? If things can be this awesome on 1998
hardware, we really should aspire to this level of KISS, tidiness and
performance in Illumos.

Garrett's cutting away in illumos-core, but the snag there is that you run
across the problem I mentioned in a recent talk - one person's trash is
another one's treasure. So I'm not sure hacking bits out of illumos
is necessarily the way; certainly in Tribblix I just use packaging to
selectively ship certain components and ignore others.

For regular distros there are a couple of major resource constraints:
ZFS has a certain footprint. (Although it's somewhat overstated - I've
run zfs based systems that have 512M of memory quite happily. Not
as file servers, of course.) If you have IPS for packaging then your
minimum memory requirement is going to be much higher.

If you want to get really minimalist then you could use ufs rather
than zfs. This also saves the space needed for the drivers and tools,
which isn't negligible. Tribblix again is one of the only distros to
support installation to a ufs file system, although it's been a while
since I tested it.

There's a slight difference in emphasis in the Solarish world. Because
we've been into containerization for so long, you have the model where
a larger instance runs many lightweight containers, rather than running
many standalone instances; in this world there isn't the same drive
to reduce the host footprint. So I guess it hasn't had a lot of attention.

Post by Jacob Ritorto

Post by Jerry Kemp

Post by Jerry Kemp
You have taken it a lot further than I would have.
For an Ultra 5 or 10, I probably would not have gone past Solaris 10, and due
to your ram being well under 4 Gb, I would stay on UFS vs ZFS.
When you say "Solaris 11 install" in reference to this box, do you mean an
install of Sun OpenSolaris?

snv_65 is an early development build of Solaris 11 - actually more like Solaris
10 than even the earliest Solaris 11 releases.

yep. Missed that part, and saw it less than 10 minutes after hitting the
send button. Sun OpenSolaris Nevada build 65.
But I still stick by my comments concerning the system RAM. If the OP is
committed to this box, now is probably a great time to max out the

memory.

Post by Jerry Kemp
Especially if he wants to move forward beyond OpenSolaris Nevada build

65.

Post by Jerry Kemp
Jerry
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[Jacob Ritorto]

Post by Peter Tribble
If you want to get really minimalist then you could use ufs rather
than zfs. This also saves the space needed for the drivers and tools,
which isn't negligible. Tribblix again is one of the only distros to
support installation to a ufs file system, although it's been a while
since I tested it.
I'd be interested in helping out with this, if you're motivated enough to

include it on your distro. Let's talk off-list.

Post by Peter Tribble
There's a slight difference in emphasis in the Solarish world. Because
we've been into containerization for so long, you have the model where
a larger instance runs many lightweight containers, rather than running
many standalone instances; in this world there isn't the same drive
to reduce the host footprint. So I guess it hasn't had a lot of attention.

Very true point. Maybe, in all honestly, I guess I just really miss having
a good unix workstation as my daily driver. I got relocated from OI to
Macintosh rather forcefully at last job and was just never terribly
'comfortable,' so to speak, since then.

-j

Post by Peter Tribble

Post by Peter Tribble

Post by Jerry Kemp

Post by Andrew Gabriel

Post by Jerry Kemp
You have taken it a lot further than I would have.
For an Ultra 5 or 10, I probably would not have gone past Solaris 10, and due
to your ram being well under 4 Gb, I would stay on UFS vs ZFS.
When you say "Solaris 11 install" in reference to this box, do you

mean

Post by Peter Tribble

Post by Jerry Kemp

Post by Andrew Gabriel

Post by Jerry Kemp
an
install of Sun OpenSolaris?

snv_65 is an early development build of Solaris 11 - actually more

like

Post by Peter Tribble

Post by Jerry Kemp

Post by Andrew Gabriel
Solaris
10 than even the earliest Solaris 11 releases.

yep. Missed that part, and saw it less than 10 minutes after hitting

the

Post by Peter Tribble

Post by Jerry Kemp
send button. Sun OpenSolaris Nevada build 65.
But I still stick by my comments concerning the system RAM. If the OP

is

Post by Peter Tribble

Post by Jerry Kemp
committed to this box, now is probably a great time to max out the

memory.

Post by Jerry Kemp
Especially if he wants to move forward beyond OpenSolaris Nevada build

65.

Post by Jerry Kemp
Jerry
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--
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
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[David Brodbeck]

Post by Peter Tribble
ZFS has a certain footprint. (Although it's somewhat overstated - I've
run zfs based systems that have 512M of memory quite happily. Not
as file servers, of course.)

I think the footprint of ZFS is mostly a matter of what features you're
using and how much you're scaling out. e.g., each additional filesystem
requires some memory, dedup requires more memory, etc. I have in the past
had problems with the ARC getting too large and causing allocation failures
on a 4 GB system, but that was a fileserver with a few hundred filesystems
and a heavy I/O load.