# Sun Blade 1500 install boot fails



## Graaf_van_Vlaanderen (Jan 9, 2010)

I tried to boot FreeBSD 8 Sparc iso version, but while booting the kernel it hangs. Can anybody confirm this? Could this be related to a required PROM upgrade, which can at a first glimpse only be performed after booting Solaris OS.

Currently I have only succeeded in installing OpenBSD4.6 on this machine.


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## mlapointe (Mar 10, 2010)

*Booting a Blade 1500*

I have the same problem on my SB1500,

The boot hangs when it says it is jumping to 0x000####### to boot the kernel.


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## Oko (Mar 10, 2010)

Graaf_van_Vlaanderen said:
			
		

> I tried to boot FreeBSD 8 Sparc iso version, but while booting the kernel it hangs. Can anybody confirm this? Could this be related to a required PROM upgrade, which can at a first glimpse only be performed after booting Solaris OS.
> 
> Currently I have only succeeded in installing OpenBSD4.6 on this machine.



FreeBSD and for that matter NetBSD do not work on SUN blade 1500. Have you bother to check 
the list of supported hardware?

Sparc port of FreeBSD is tier three or four architecture which in practical sense means that it was experimental at best when it was conceived and right now is dead. It never supported 
SMP kernel on sparc64!

More or less the same goes for NetBSD even though NetBSD port was tier one architecture in the past and originally used by OpenBSD people to create OpenBSD port. NetBSD sparc64 is usable but very buggy.

What is exactly wrong with OpenBSD on your SUN Blade 1500? Most OpenBSD developers use that
exactly same station to hack the kernel. I use older SUN station when porting software.
Nobody supports Sparc hardware better than OpenBSD.

If you do not like OpenBSD go get the Solaris 10. You do not have much of a choice. 

Cheers,
OKO

By the way Linux is a joke on SUN Blade 1500.


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## Graaf_van_Vlaanderen (Mar 10, 2010)

Oko said:
			
		

> FreeBSD and for that matter NetBSD do not work on SUN blade 1500. Have you bother to check
> the list of supported hardware?
> 
> Sparc port of FreeBSD is tier three or four architecture which in practical sense means that it was experimental at best when it was conceived and right now is dead. It never supported
> ...



Thanks for the feedback. I ran OpenBSD on this machine for a while...until the hard disk failed. I replaced it with 'just another' IDE hard drive and guess what... It does not recognize the hard drive for some obscure reason. Anyway, it's been more than a month since I have been looking into it and I'm not intending to look into it again. The machine has become too slow anyway.


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## mmoll (Mar 26, 2010)

Oko said:
			
		

> Sparc port of FreeBSD is tier three or four architecture which in practical sense means that it was experimental at best when it was conceived and right now is dead. It never supported
> SMP kernel on sparc64!



Nonsense.


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## mmoll (Mar 26, 2010)

mlapointe said:
			
		

> The boot hangs when it says it is jumping to 0x000####### to boot the kernel.



Try to use a serial console for the initial install. For X and other stuff, see the mailing list archives of freebsd-sparc64 of December 2009. Anton Shterenlikht uses a Blade 1500 as workstation after working around some problems.

OpenBSD at the moment has without doubts better sparc64 support, especially on workstations, but I use FreeBSD on sparc64 since 6.0 and it does a very good job as DNS/Web/Mail/MySQL server.


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## trasz@ (May 8, 2010)

Oko said:
			
		

> Sparc port of FreeBSD is tier three or four architecture which in practical sense means that it was experimental at best when it was conceived and right now is dead.



If you paid attention to the commit logs, you'd notice that sparc64 port is being actively maintained and developed.  Recently it got support for Fujitsu machines, for example.


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