Saturday, October 10, 2015

Oracle strikes back!

The Oracle Enterprise Linux for sun4v has just been released!

Based on RHEL 6 and kernel 4.1.  https://oss.oracle.com/projects/linux-sparc/

How cool is that?!?

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi

I have been following your blog for two years plus... Great work ! Thank you for all the time you have spent on writing/debugging/hacking stuff !

One comment regarding Oracle Lunux for Sparc... I almost get it to boot on Ultra 5... Almost, as it hangs on some PROM checksum error... Waiting for the replacement battery and PROM... I will report back... Maybe it really is a sun4v "distro"... Will see...

Best regards

Piotr

Anonymous said...

Hi again

I meant to say: "maybe it really is a sun4v ONLY distro, that is why it hangs on Ultra 5..."

Best regards

Piotr

atar said...

Thanks for sharing! Can you please post a boot log?
Are you using a serial console?

Btw, Oracle developers reading the debian-sparc mailing list. Perhaps you can ask there.

Anonymous said...

Hi

I started looking for serial cable that will actually work... The three that I found at home, do not... For the moment I am stuck with a real LCD when it comes to getting boot log. Nevertheless, I assume, that there is a problem with PROM rather then kernel... Also RAM might be a sort of an issue as I have only 256 MB... Next 256 MB are on the way... I will report back asap. I can send a screenshot with the messages from kernel booting (interesting, as the kernel sniffs the architecture and prints some hints on which instruction sets are available, like old sun4u VIS instructions for example, so looks like maybe, just maybe, sun4u will be sufficient to run this distro or at least parts of it).

Piotr

atar said...

yeah, 256M is probably way too few. I think, even the last Debian requires more.

Anonymous said...

Hi

Long story short. RAM upgraded to 512 MB (whoaaa !). NVRAM battery dead. Replaced. Now... Debian 7.9 works (512 MB is not enough to have Epiphany browser working stable though... Lots and lots of OOM kills). Will try to get Oracle Linux for Sparc running today...

I'll be back !

Piotr