[SunRescue] Q on "optimal" OS for Sun4c machines, now that Solaris 8 won't run

[jwbirdsa at picarefy.picarefy.com]

>>>   For free OSes, nobody gives a damn about testing, it seems. Do not,
>>>repeat NOT, assume that just because something is listed as supported that
>>>it will actually work. It's listed because it worked at least one time in
>>>one configuration for one person somewhere. Unless it's a popular piece of
>>>hardware (or the pet of a maintainer), odds are that it probably doesn't
>>>anymore. I've been burned too many times to have any faith in the
>>>supported-hardware lists.
>
>Hmm... I seem to see just the opposite.  Because the open source developers
>pool is so large they seem to run on more kinds of hardware than you can
>count.  (When was the last time you saw Arcnet cards?  They're out there.  I
>know people are using them.  I even have some, abeit not in use but they
>work.)

   For PC ports, hardware support is, I will admit, pretty good: most
things that were even moderately popular at one time are supported and
working. However, as soon as you leave the PC world, things change, and
much of my opinion of free OSes has been formed by a months-long effort to
get NetBSD working on my Sun-3's and SPARCs. I've been reduced to running
everything on 3/50's and 3/60's because nothing else works reliably -- the
VME-based units have a variety of problems, and my poor 3/80 limps along
with a crashing problem due to a memory leak in the kernel. Supposedly at
least some of these problems are fixed in 1.4.2, and when I have some time
to experiment I'll check it out, but for production systems I'm limited to
3/50's and 3/60's, because that's what's *actually* supported in 1.4 to a
useful degree. The SPARCs were total non-starters: boot support for si SCSI
is totally broken, meaning that the 4/2xx was down for the count, and there
was some other problem on my SLC, so that it wouldn't boot either.
   All of the hardware that failed is listed as being fully supported.

   --James B.