[rescue] Happy New Year! RIP, Sun/Solaris...

[Meelis Roos]

> > Try Debian stable. http://www.debian.org/ports/sparc64/
> 
> I had trouble with Debian on my U60--random hangs.  Seemed to go away once I
> pulled the second CPU.

I a running debian unstable with occasionally latest devel kernels. 
Leaving out bugs created and fixed during devel cycles, I have usually 
had good success - but that is mostly uniprocessor (U5, U10, V100, X1, 
Blade 100, sometimes U1) and the only SMP sparc I run often is 
2-CPU E3500. Sometimes also 6-CPU E3000 and 4-CPU E450.

The only persistent problem I have had with sparclinux is ALi IDE DMA 
badness - hardware bugs that contain different workarounds in drivers 
but these are not 100% successful. Blade 100, V100 and X1 all have ALi 
IDE. With old IDE driver the machine was unusable - hard hang quickly. 
With current libata pata_ali it usually works - I can run for months 
with weekly package upgrades in unstable, and compiling kernels. But if 
I try to copy large amount of data to the disk from network, hangs still 
occur. So avoid running your disks off onboard ALi IDE if you want the 
machines to be more than toys. CMD IDE and anything SCSI have been 
stable. Qlogic FC is OK, Sun socal FC lacks a Linux driver, have not 
used any other FC HBA with sparclinux.

There was a long-standing stability bug in SMP sparc kernels that the 
buildd's experienced but that was supposedly fixed for lenny release 
AFAIK... but as you experienced problems, there's certainly something 
wrong still.

-- 
Meelis Roos (mroos at linux.ee)