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

[Dave McGuire]

On July 12, jwbirdsa at picarefy.picarefy.com wrote:
>    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.

  I think you're running into the "not what most of them run" problem
that was alluded to earlier in this thread.  I hate it.  It seems that
most people (myself included) who run NetBSD/sparc are running it on
SS2, SS5, SS10, and SS20 machines.  I'd guess that probably 80% of all
NetBSD/sparc systems are those four models.

  Those, however, install and run flawlessly, and have for years.
Hell, I just finished helping to build a company around the darned
things...hundreds of them.  They just don't quit.

            -Dave McGuire