So i got the T1000 working again (finally, after much screwing about trying to get the part). I then hit the ever annoying “no console” problem, where the console didn’t work – kind of problematic.
After a firmware upgrade, and passing “console=/dev/ttyS0” to the kernel, things work.
So the T1000 firmware 6.3 doesn’t work with modern debian kernels. Thing swork with 6.7 though.
Stopping All Servers
All 221 tests were successful.
The servers were restarted 14 times
Spent 1424.921 of 1521 seconds executing testcases
(All tests have passed on OpenSolaris on x86 for a while now).
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- System Temperatures (Temperatures in Celsius): -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sensor Status Temp LowHard LowSoft LowWarn HighWarn HighSoft HighHard -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- MB/T_AMB OK 43 -10 -5 0 45 50 55 MB/CMP0/T_TCORE OK 51 -10 -5 0 85 90 95 MB/CMP0/T_BCORE OK 51 -10 -5 0 85 90 95 MB/IOB/T_CORE OK 55 -10 -5 0 95 100 105
Spoke too soon:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- System Temperatures (Temperatures in Celsius): -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sensor Status Temp LowHard LowSoft LowWarn HighWarn HighSoft HighHard -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- MB/T_AMB OK 45 -10 -5 0 45 50 55 MB/CMP0/T_TCORE OK 58 -10 -5 0 85 90 95 MB/CMP0/T_BCORE OK 58 -10 -5 0 85 90 95 MB/IOB/T_CORE OK 57 -10 -5 0 95 100 105
Since I got fed up with Solaris the other day, the T1000 is running Debian. This means that “I’ll care about Drizzle on Linux Sparc”.
OMG were things broken in the most “trivial” ways.
A good quick intro to the issues is Memory alignment on SPARC, or a 300x speedup!
It all comes down to memory alignment.
So I pulled the MySQL 6.0 bzr tree onto the box to try it too… I haven’t seen so many compiler warnings in ages (okay… since I last built MySQL.. drizzle is warning-clean and it makes it hard to remember a time before that). I think it works purely by accident.
So I’m gradually getting all of Drizzle working on Linux Sparc (a few things fixed already).
It’d be great if the T1k had faster disk though (make -j30 is fun… but IO isn’t on a single 160GB 7200rpm disk)… anybody wanting to donate an SSD?
After what many hours trying to netboot the T1000 to install Solaris Express, I wondered “how hard is it for debian?”.
Easy. get the sparc64 boot.img, put it on TFTP server, add “filename “boot.img”;” or similar to dhcp, boot the T1000 from the service console something like this “bootmode bootscript=”boot net:dhcp”\n restart -c” and install away!
As for Solaris?
Well… dhcpd.conf:
option space SUNW;
option SUNW.root-mount-options code 1 = text;
option SUNW.root-server-ip-address code 2 = ip-address;
option SUNW.root-server-hostname code 3 = text;
option SUNW.root-path-name code 4 = text;
option SUNW.swap-server-ip-address code 5 = ip-address;
option SUNW.swap-file-path code 6 = text;
option SUNW.boot-file-path code 7 = text;
option SUNW.posix-timezone-string code 8 = text;
option SUNW.boot-read-size code 9 = unsigned integer 16;
option SUNW.install-server-ip-address code 10 = ip-address;
option SUNW.install-server-hostname code 11 = text;
option SUNW.install-path code 12 = text;
option SUNW.sysid-config-file-server code 13 = text;
option SUNW.JumpStart-server code 14 = text;
option SUNW.terminal-name code 15 = text;
option SUNW.SbootURI code 16 = text;
host hurricane {
hardware ethernet 0:14:4f:1e:28:e;
fixed-address 192.168.1.19;
option host-name “hurricane”;
filename “sparc64-etch-boot.img”;
#Â Â Â Â Â Â filename “sol-nv-b103-sparc”;
#Â Â Â Â Â Â option SUNW.install-server-ip-address 192.168.1.1;
#Â Â Â Â Â Â option SUNW.install-server-hostname “saturn”;
#Â Â Â Â Â Â option SUNW.install-path “/mnt/sol-nv-b103-sparc/”;
#Â Â Â Â Â Â option SUNW.root-server-ip-address 192.168.1.1;
#Â Â Â Â Â Â option SUNW.root-server-hostname “saturn”;
#Â Â Â Â Â Â option SUNW.root-path-name “/mnt/sol-nv-b103-sparc/Solaris_11/Tools/Boot”;
}
(obviously changing the comments around) and having the Solaris Express DVD mounted and NFS exported…. it *still* doesn’t work. It goes “unable to mount filesystem” with no further hints (even when tcpdumping the network).
Documentation for doing the simple thing of using $dhcp_server and $nfs_server to network boot a Solaris install on a Sparc box is *COMPLETELY* missing.
Now, I’m a smart guy (and if you don’t believe that, at least believe I’m not stupid). If I can’t get it to boot the installer, what chance do others have?
I’ll try OpenSolaris out when it’s on SPARC (and please oh please oh please just have an easy way to net boot the installer using a linux host). Please take the debian way (just a single file on tftp).
So now it’s goodbye Solaris (I’m not going to have something I can’t re-install, upgrade or security patch) and it’s hello Debian (and sanity).
Yes, this does mean I’ll care about Drizzle on Linux Sparc.
How?
Seriously, how do I do this?
Following constraints: T1000 has no local DVD drive. No other Solaris hosts on network.
(Note that it takes about 15 seconds to find the Debian install instructions. “Put this file on tftp server, boot.”)
Scaling MySQL on a 256-way T5440 server using Solaris ZFS and Java 1.7
*cough*
(and then wipe coffee off the computer)
of course the real aim should be to scale with one instance on the machine as scaling with multiple instances on the one machine isn’t scaling at all – it’s scale out, but with more problems (now when one machine goes down, so do 1110202434 database instances).