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

[BSDBobtheoldgreybeardBSDfreakbobkey at weedcon1.cropsci.ncsu.edu]

>    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.

Jim... respectfully, I will have to play the devil's advocate, and counter
that, a bit.  First, I too, have had bountiful troubles trying to get
anything sun3 up on NetBSD.  The 3/60 class machines with the builtin
esp controllers do fine.  The VME based controller systems have only
worked for me just recently, with the 1.4.2 suite.  It is running like
a striped arsed ape on my 3/260 crate, although the tape drivers are
still a bit munged, but everything else seems fine.  It loads OK from
tape, but once up, is slow as molasses, reading or writing tapes.

On the sun4 crates, the only thing I have gotten up was OpenBSD (loaded on
a 4c box then transferring drives to a 4/110 with esp built-in controller),
and that was fine.  It was on the generic kernel, which has sun4 support.
But, it is only on the built-in controllers, AFIK.  On the sun4 VME scsi
controller crates, still no go.  My 4/260 still runs SunOS 4.1.3.

But, all of the 4c machines I have tried (4/20, 4/60, etc.) seem to just
load and go on NetBSD and OpenBSD (although my preference is for OpenBSD
since it seems to install a trifle better, and be a little less fussy
about setting up etc scripts).  This is probably because most of the
sparc development has been on 4c class boxes.  The old VME monsters
just are not plentiful enough to give the support base to.

On 4c class machines, I have no problem recommending NetBSD or OpenBSD
and the support seems to be quite good there.  There may be some odd
or lesser used boards that might not be supported, but, the generic
machine as a workstation or server, seems quite good.  I use an SS1
on OpenBSD with 40M ram and 6 gig of HD as a web/ftp archive server,
and it has been stable as a rock.  X, as expected, browser in tow,
is a little slow, but other than that, it does well for a lowend box.

Hopefully, the dust will settle in the 3/xxx line, and we will all
be happy.  I do wish, though, better 4/xxx support was there, but,
maybe it will come.

Bob