[Sunhelp] E4500 and Solaris 8

[Dale Ghent]

On Fri, 20 Oct 2000, The Archimage wrote:

| I have heard that the E4500 has a problem with Solaris 8 - something to
| do with the processors or cache.  Anyone know anything about this?

This is not a problem with Solaris 8, or any other Solaris rev.

This is a issue with the Exx00 CPU hardware itself. It's very susceptable
to environmental noise and temp, and this is what had been causing all the
rucus about the CPU cache memory problems in the press.

Sun has repsonded, and has provided kernel patches that have code that
"scrubs" the CPU cache (referred to as "E$" - e-cache, or external
cache) and reduces the amount of and increses survivability of parity
errors in the cache that may occur.

The kernel patches that incorporates the scrubber code are:

Solaris 2.6: 105181-23
Solaris 8:   108528-03

I just checked, and it doesnt seem that Solaris 7's kernel patch has been
updated yet with the scrubber code (I know this isnt relevant to you, but
I'm just saying this for the rest of the list.)

Also, the latest SUNW-Enterprise PROM version (3.2.27) has additional
cache scrubber stuff in it. It is patch number 103346-27.

/dale