🚀 go-pugleaf

In comp.sys.sun.hardware Craig Dewick <cdewick@lios.apana.org.au> wrote:

> 4/6xx boards can run SunOS 5.6 (aka Solaris 2.6) with some kernel fiddling
> to remove the machine type check. There's no VME support as of 5.6, so it
> makes a 4/6xx into a very capable single-board Sun-4m machine with lots of
> Sbus slots. And one good thing is that 4/6xx's use standard 4 meg, 30 pin
> parity SIMM's.

A funny thing: The VME memory-boards work. They show up as vmemem, so
they haven't hacked-away the VME-support completely...

BTW, The SIMM:s on the main-board must be 80ns (which means 70ns PC ..)
4MB or 16MB, and the expansion-boards can be config:ed for 80ns and
100ns 1MB, 4MB or 16MB. This means you can put 2.5GB memory in the
machine, rather impressive not to mention the sight of 160 SIMM:s ;)

> Another limitation, besides the lack of VME support (but who really needs
> that these days anyway?), is that you can't use the older types of Mbus CPU
> modules since SunOS 5.6 dropped support for them too. Things like the SM-5x
> and SM-6x modules do generally work (not all variants of each though), but
> not the older SM-100's.

They show up as TI,TMS390Z55 (or something similar) in dmesg &
/var/adm/messages. I think the output from module-info (or what it's
called) in the PROM is the same.

> I don't however have a record of what needs to be done with the kernel to
> disable the 4/6xx system checking routine. Does anyone have a saved copy of
> the news article(s) which detailed what to do to make SunOS 5.6 work on
> 4/6xx boards?

Use adb -w /platform/sun4m/kernel/unix
Somewhere near startup+0x74c it should read 'call halt'. Change that
line to 'nop' instead.

It works real well, but it's a pain when you forget to do it again when
you apply some kernel-patch...


> >Solaris 2.7 will not support some older hardware, anyone that knows more
> >precise ?

> I presume the Sun-4c will be dropped, since they are getting very old now
> (but still extremely useful) compared to all the Ultrasparc models being
> released.

Well, since Computer-clubs never gets new hardware for free, I'd rather
see that they kept the support for old hardware. But since they still
are shipping patches to Solaris 2.4, we survive ;)

-- 

/Nikke - SysAdmin, Academic Computer Club, Ume� University, Sweden

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 Niklas Edmundsson, Admin @ {ing,acc}.umu.se          |   nikke@ing.umu.se
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