LINUXKNOW-HOW USER SchlagwortLinux on sollteSPARC hier stehen Putting Linux on a Sun SPARC machine THE SPARC DIFFERENCE We all know Linux works smoothly on PCs, but the PC’s x86 archictecture is just one of a range of platforms Linux supports. This article gives you a head start with setting up Linux on a Sun SPARC machine. BY ARMIJN HEMEL uring the .com era, nearly every and you’ll find lots of SPARCstation 10 •Debian GNU/Linux: the longest living company was running on Sun and 20 workstations available, for exam- SPARC distribution Dsystems, and the Sun SPARC ple, on eBay. There is also a good chance •Gentoo platform was also a big part of the mar- people in your local LUG or university • Splack: Slackware for SPARC. ket share in academia. This abundance might have old Sun machines they want All these distributions come with man- of SPARC machines means you can pick to get rid of. agement tools that are also available on up a SPARC for not much money – you The (32-bit) SPARC was one of the x86 (RPM and yum for Aurora, apt for might even have an under-used SPARC first (if not the first) platform Linux was Debian, portage for Gentoo, pkgtools for sitting around your office. ported to after x86. Various vendors, Splack). In addition to the distributions I Linux has supported the SPARC plat- such as Red Hat, used to have boxed sets just mentioned, a few smaller distribu- form for many years, and SPARC is still with CDs for SPARC systems about 6 tions also support SPARC. one of the most popular alternative plat- years ago, but the market share of Linux forms for Linux. In many ways, Linux on on SPARC has never been big. The com- INFO a SPARC is very similar to Linux on a PC, mercial distributions quickly ceased [1] Sun systems overview: but if you want your SPARC installation development, because it simply was not http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_ to go smoothly, there are some differ- financially viable to maintain a separate pub/Systems/ ences you should keep in mind. This version for SPARC. Nowadays all the [2] SPARC CPU names guide: article describes some SPARC systems major distributions for SPARC are com- http://www.sparcproductdirectory. that work with Linux, some Linux sys- munity driven. com/sparccpu.html tems that work with SPARC, and some Popular SPARC Linux distributions [3] Aurora Linux Hardware Compatibility: details you’ll need to know if you’re include: http://auroralinux.org/cgi-bin/wiki. putting Linux on a Sun. •Aurora Linux: the first versions were pl?HardwareCompatibility based on Red Hat 7.3, but work is [4] SILO bootloader: Linux and SPARC being done to bring the current ver- http://www.sparc-boot.org/ Sun hardware isn’t that hard to get (see sion into sync with the latest Fedora [5] Wikipedia pages about byte endian- “Box 2: Finding a Sun machine.”). The Core release and eventually merge it ness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Sun SPARCstation series sold really well, into Fedora Core. Endianness 56 ISSUE 54 MAY 2005 WWW.LINUX- MAGAZINE.COM Linux on SPARC KNOW-HOW The oldest of the SPARC machines, sun4, kering, and Linux will most probably not A disk in a SPARC system is a bit dif- is largely unsupported by Linux. Later work on them anyway, although there ferent. There can be 8 partitions in total SPARCs are supported with varying are reports that Linux boots on some on a disk. The third partition represents degrees of success. Some machines only mid-range servers, such as the Enter- the whole disk. There are also some work reliably in uniprocessor mode and prise 4500. restrictions with respect to the layout, not in SMP mode. For some machines, such as that a partition that uses its first different subtypes are not supported, for Installing Linux on SPARC sector (such as swap) should not start at example, the SPARCstation 5 with a 170 We tested Aurora SPARC Linux on an disk cylinder 0 because it will destroy MHz CPU is not supported, whereas Ultra 10 machine. The Ultra 10 has IDE the disk label. Furthermore, if you want other SPARCstation 5 machines are sup- disks and a PCI bus, with an UltraSPARC ported. The reason for this is that the IIi CPU, and it is very well supported by Box 1: Endianness 170 Mhz used a CPU from another man- Linux. The Aurora install isn’t that much All SPARC chips are big endian, whereas ufacturer. more difficult than Red Hat on a “nor- x86 CPUs are little endian. On big endian A lot of the current development is mal” PC, as the installer does a lot of the systems, the most significant byte is done on newer UltraSPARC desktop nasty work for you. But there are some stored first. On little endian systems the machines with PCI. Because of this, the fundamental differences between the least significant byte is stored first. In 32-bit SPARC machines and SBus-based two architectures you should know some cases, this might be an issue; for UltraSPARC machines sometimes lag a about when things go awry. example, with programs that use a spe- bit. New kernels don’t always want to One of the differences between a Sun cial binary format for datafiles. Some run properly on these machines, and it machine and a normal PC is the way programs expect their data to be in takes a few kernel versions to fix the harddisks are partitioned. A PC system some specific byte order. The cases are problems. can have up to 4 primary partitions on a pretty rare – I have only seen a few cases of it, mainly with old MacOS programs, The high-end servers are too expen- disk, one of which can be an extended such as MacWrite II – but it can happen. sive and generally not available for tin- partition with more logical partitions in it. Box 2: Finding a Sun machine Not every Sun machine has a SPARC FibreChannel and hot-swappable PCI, UltraSPARC clones, such as Solair and chip inside. Sun machines up until ver- but moved to PC technology on the Tadpole. These machines are identical to sion 4 were based on Motorola’s 68000 workstation market. The Ultra 5 and Ultra normal Sun machines on the inside. chips, and there were a few machines 10 desktop machines were the first Often you will see references to things with Intel 386 chips as well. If you want machines that commercially shipped like sparcv8 or sparc64. The former to run a free operating system on the with a PCI bus, IDE disks, and VGA con- describes the version of the SPARC archi- Motorola machines, NetBSD would be nectors (either onboard or as an expan- tecture. There are 3 versions that can be your best choice, with either the sun2 or sion card). found in the wild: sun3 port. These machines are from the Since 1996, the UltraSPARC chip has •sparcv7: version 7 of the SPARC archi- 1980s and are quite useless by today’s been used in almost all machines, with tecture, 32 bits standards. Sun has also shipped x86 the notable exception of various incarna- •sparcv8: version 8 of the SPARC archi- chips in their Cobalt machines and has tions of the JavaStation, Sun’s failed thin tecture, 32 bits recently started using AMD Opteron client. The JavaStation used a SPARC •sparcv9: version 9 of the SPARC archi- chips for servers and workstations. chip on a board with PC components (PC tecture, 64 bits The SPARC chip has been used since memory, PCI bus). Newer versions have more possibilities 1987, when Sun introduced version 4 of To make things even more interesting, that a program can take advantage of their machines. Version 4 became know not every SPARC chip is made by Sun. during run time. Most Linux distributions as “Sun4.” Some of the Sun4 subtypes The SPARC standards are maintained by compile for sparcv7, but for some pack- are shown in Table 1. a separate company, SPARC Interna- ages, in particular openssl, it is benificial The first generation of Sun4 machines tional. The standards are freely down- to use special optimization flags during used the VMEbus, which was also used loadable and can be implemented with- compilation. Some distributions, like in Motorola-based Sun computers. Later, out having to pay royalties to SPARC Aurora, ship special precompiled pack- Sun switched to the SBus bus, which International or Sun. There is a SPARCv8 ages for openssl for sparcv8 and was used in all subsequent SPARC certified chip designed at ESA that has a sparcv9. machines. Quite a few machines also design released under the LGPL. Designs have MBus slots, which can be used to for this chip, called LEON SPARC, can be Terms like sparc32 and sparc64 do not add extra CPUs to the machine. downloaded from http://www.gaisler. describe chips in particular but, instead, describe environments. Early UltraSPARC-based computers, com/. such as the Ultra 1 and 1e and the Ultra In Japan, Fujitsu has made its own •sparc32: a 32-bit SPARC environment 2, used SBus for connecting expansion SPARC and UltraSPARC versions. •sparc64: a 64-bit SPARC environment cards, Sun specific memory and SCA Recently, Sun and Fujitsu made a deal It is quite normal to have a sparc32 envi- disks. Sun stayed with these technolo- about cooperating on designing future ronment running on a 64-bit SPARC chip. gies for most servers, with new high-end versions of their SPARC chips.