[rescue] What Linux can run on Sun Fire V890 (UltraSparc IV+) server

[Aaron Scheiner]

Wow, you people don't waste time.

MJ Turner : "some details of your Debian problems to the
debian-sparc mailing list."
 Already done so :) .

MJ Turner : "David S. Miller (the kernel hacker responsible
for SPARC) is fairly active there and perhaps he can help."
 Thanks :) I e-mailed Meelis Roos and he also mentioned David Miller.

Meelis Roos : "console bugs were just fixed for 480R/V880/"
The bug's behaviour changes depending on the console specified, however
the error is : "Kernel unaligned access at TPC[46d24c]"

Sevan / Venture37 : "Try a snapshot
ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/snapshots/sparc64/install46.iso"
*downloading* thanks :) .

Lionel Petersen : "Have you considered selling the Sun box and buying an
x86 box that's better suited to your needs?"
I must admit I have considered selling it, I could make a fair profit
out of it... however... the idea of having a massive server lying around
is pretty cool... I've always liked Sun too... owning some of their
hardware is quite an honour I think. 

Jerry K : "I am at a loss as to why Solaris or OpenSolaris wouldn't 
be the ideal OS for this system."
 Solaris fits well on this system... the fans slow down shortly after
Solaris has booted, I'm sure Linux won't do that without a lot of
tweaking :P . The thing is that this machine is owned privately and
isn't required to be stable, on 24/7, serve web pages, etc. There's no
reason why Linux shouldn't be able to run on this machine. Solaris isn't
fully compliant with Linux... there's a lot of software available for
Linux which won't run on Solaris without lots of magic :P . So far,
Solaris on this machine has been really good at generating fractals :) .
The JRE supplied with Solaris is very very efficient, which is great
because I actually know Java quite well (don't kill me pleeeeease).

Jonathan Katz : "The OP (Aaron?) suggested he wanted a platform for
ffmpeg and other fun things to (I assume) transcode video."
 I just want to put it to good use really. I'm involved in the video
world and we often film stuff in HD... then we get people who want to
see the footage but don't have fast enough machines to watch it with, so
I generate proxy files (files of a lower resolution and lower bitrate).
I figured that would be a particularly good task for a machine of this
size (virtual size). It'd probably also be good for adjusting/grading
the colo(u)r and contrast of footage. But yeah... fun stuff in general
is good too... :) .

Jonathan Katz : "However, after playing around with blastwave, there
does seem to be a pre-compiled copy of ffmpeg, but not blender."
 Blastwave is fantastic! Wow, when I first tried typing commands in
Solaris... oh boy... no wget, no nano, no tab. It was quite frustrating.
Blastwave solved all that fairly quickly. Blastwave's version of FFMPEG
is quite old and isn't very useful, it lacks a lot of the codecs that
make FFMPEG useful.... something that's really easy to compile on Ubuntu
is angry on Solaris. I am thankful to Blastwave for making Solaris a lot
friendlier.

William Enestvedt : "Knowing that our flagship PROD boxes are
being discussed on the Rescue list -- again -- chokes me up a little."
 Will... if it helps, the people who sold me these machines thought it
was some kind of filing cabinet and wanted to melt it down for scrap.

and wow... a Linux Zone... this could be the answer! Thanks Will! :D
Virtual machines had crossed my mind but this is obviously far more
efficient.

Ray Arachelian : "Only ones I've seen 
mentioned was for opensolaris on x86."
...ai :( . Although, they don't seem to mention x86 as a requirement.

Joshua Boyd : "It is rare that you will miss the windows codecs in my
experience."
I certainly won't... I'm mainly interested in MPEG2 and H264.

Sevan : "www.pkgsrc.org"
pkgsrv is available for Solaris but it does battle building some
packages... it's definitely on my to-try list :P . Thanks.

Lionel Petersen : "B) the OP could not find pre-compiled versions of
those apps for Solaris"
He couldn't, at least not anything worthwhile.

"C) the OP was either unable or unsuccessful at porting those apps to  
Solaris"
It's a mission ;) , as you can see from Chris Mile's article... and
that's quite old now. It also doesn't include a few tasty
libraries/codecs.

"D) that the problem the OP was trying to solve was to run specific  
apps, not to find an excuse to run 'something' on the server"
Well... got jobs to process... got a big machine... 

MPEG2 is quite a complex codec... H264 even more so... it can take over
a day (+/- 14 hours) for my Intel Core 2 Duo running at 2GHz with 4GBs
of RAM to process a 1 hour HD file.

Jonathan Groll : "Still, we do rescue these things, don't we
all?"
...poor William Enestvedt.

Goeff : "Video compression is not AFAIK something that can be done in
parallel..."

There are different ways of handling it... if it's an existing file and
not a stream, you can divide the file up into slices and give each slice
to a separate core. The other method, for streams, which manages to
max-out my 8-core mac is to give a group-of-pictures to each core. So
for long GOP MPEG2 you'd give each processor 12 frames at a time to
process. One of the processors will generally be used for audio.

Thanks for your help everyone... what a great thread. It's like opening
up the mail and not finding bills :) .

So... on the to-do list for later is :
Try pkgsrc on Solaris.
Try a Linux Zone.
Try install46.iso snapshot.
Try building a custom kernel with a patch supplied by Debian devs and
boot it.

Aaron