# Is someone running FreeBSD on sparc64?



## mercurius (Oct 26, 2019)

I see a couple of questions about various ports.
I would like to share experience because I have strange problems sometimes, programs stop by Signal 11 (core dumped) and some ports aren't built.

Maybe I can also be useful somehow. I am running FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE on Sun Blade 100.


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## RedPhoenix (Oct 26, 2019)

mercurius said:


> I see a couple of questions about various ports.
> I would like to share experience because I have strange problems sometimes, programs stop by Signal 11 (core dumped) and some ports aren't built.
> 
> Maybe I can also be useful somehow. I am running FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE on Sun Blade 100.


This is an interesting topic.  Is Sparc64 64 Bit?  I'm betting it is.  Remember: what a Compiler does is to produce instructions for the underlying CPU to follow, and also the Platform, such as Windows NT, FreeBSD, NetBSD, TinyCore Linux, etc.. Though you may have already known this. So, it seems to be a matter of getting the Programs to Compile.  Unfortunately, I don't have access to a Sparc64 CPU.  I wonder if BHyve could come into play here, or maybe Qemu.....


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## mark_j (Oct 27, 2019)

mercurius said:


> I see a couple of questions about various ports.
> I would like to share experience because I have strange problems sometimes, programs stop by Signal 11 (core dumped) and some ports aren't built.
> 
> Maybe I can also be useful somehow. I am running FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE on Sun Blade 100.


Well core dumps are often hit/miss for diagnosing problems. It's really whether the symbol table is intact in the binary. It's probably a good idea to note which ones fail and raise a bug report. 

There's also the sparc64 mailing list: https://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-sparc64 (I would imagine it doesn't have too much traffic).

As to the ports, again, catalogue the failures and ask on the mailing list or send a note to the port maintainer offering assistance and/or log a bug report. It's more than likely the port maintainer does not have access to a sparc64 machine, so you could do the testing for them.

(Anecdotally, I had an E250 with RAID (20+ 36GB disks) running as a media server for our business back 5+ years ago with FreeBSD. It was rock-solid.)


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## Crivens (Oct 27, 2019)

This brings back some memories.


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## yuripv (Oct 27, 2019)

I have SunFire V215 and Enterprise T5220 collecting dust, former (sun4u) would run FreeBSD, but is just too slow (but likely newer than yours? ); latter (sun4v) is not supported.


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## Datapanic (Oct 27, 2019)

I have a Sunblade 100 as well as 2 Netra X1's.  I run Solaris 9 on all of them and use the OpenCSW packages. Most of the time they're off but it's fun to run them up every now and then. I wouldn't install FreeBSD on them because for the hardware, Solaris is better. They are also behind a firewall.


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## mercurius (Oct 28, 2019)

sparc64 is 64-bit, right. I downgraded to 11.3-STABLE and, at least, I was able to build lang/python27.
thanks for the idea! I will contact port maintainers if I find more issues. I know some ports are marked 'broken' on sparc64.

Yes, Sun Fire is newer than mine  I have another SPARC, Sun Ultra 60, it's running Solaris (actually, I am going to reinstall it)


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## mark_j (Oct 28, 2019)

As Crivens said, it brings back memories:
Anyone recall the Blade 1000? Blue glowing fascia tower with dual cpu @ 900+ MHz, 2 fibre channel disks. It actually had some really powerful graphics for its day - dual graphics cards (which was overkill for me but hey I didn't pay for it)  It was my workstation back in the day (I'm tempted to say 15 years ago?) I wrote a lot of code on that noisy thing using Sun Studio on Solaris 8/9.
Under my desk it used to keep my legs warm...


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## mercurius (Oct 29, 2019)

mark_j said:


> As Crivens said, it brings back memories:
> Anyone recall the Blade 1000? Blue glowing fascia tower with dual cpu @ 900+ MHz, 2 fibre channel disks. It actually had some really powerful graphics for its day - dual graphics cards (which was overkill for me but hey I didn't pay for it)  It was my workstation back in the day (I'm tempted to say 15 years ago?) I wrote a lot of code on that noisy thing using Sun Studio on Solaris 8/9.
> Under my desk it used to keep my legs warm...



wow  so interesting machine, I have never seen fibre channel disks.


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## mercurius (Oct 29, 2019)

Sun Blade 1000 seems to be quite expensive now on Ebay. Sun Blade 100, on which I am playing with FreeBSD, was found at the street in Frankfurt am Main...


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## mark_j (Oct 29, 2019)

The technology was sort of wasted on a workstation, but if you want to read a little about what the technology is capable of, read this, it's not uber-technical:


			Fibre Channel architecture
		


Sun put it on a lot of their SunFire servers also.


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## mark_j (Oct 29, 2019)

mercurius said:


> Sun Blade 1000 seems to be quite expensive now on Ebay. Sun Blade 100, on which I am playing with FreeBSD, was found at the street in Frankfurt am Main...


I threw a Sun Blade 100 (they're the ones with 2 IDE drives and a card reader or something?) away a few years ago. 
Yes the Blade 1000 is expensive, considering they cost many thousands of dollars back in the day, they hold their value well.
It's probably slower than an emulator like Qemu nowadays.


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## mercurius (Oct 29, 2019)

mark_j said:


> I threw a Sun Blade 100 (they're the ones with 2 IDE drives and a card reader or something?) away a few years ago.
> Yes the Blade 1000 is expensive, considering they cost many thousands of dollars back in the day, they hold their value well.
> It's probably slower than an emulator like Qemu nowadays.



Yes, they are with IDE drives and card reader (mine has one IDE drive, but there's a place for the second one).
It seems to be a bit slow, but it can act as a home server, I think...


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