Sun Enterprise 6500. 10xUltraSPARC/400MHz, 10Gb mem

Sun Enterprise 6500. 10xUltraSPARC/400MHz, 10Gb mem

[Turbo Fredriksson]

How does this sound as a Linux machine? Stability? Scalability?
How good is Linux/SPARC64 in taking advantage of this amount
of CPU's? I've heard that Linux scales up to 32 CPU's (old number?)
but I guess that's on x86, not SPARC64?


Would it (Linux) even run on such a machine? I've tried getting
it to work on a E3000, but is getting huge problems with the SCSI
interface (esp if I remember correctly)...
This was a friends machine, and I was only called in as help. Never
got it to work correctly with any of the standard Debian GNU/Linux
kernels we tried. Next step was to make a custom kernel, but friend
travels a lot so there's little time to work on this.
Now he's shopping for a E6500 (eBay). But I'm a little skeptical
on getting it to work (at all and/or good). Any pointers? Ideas?

Re: Sun Enterprise 6500. 10xUltraSPARC/400MHz, 10Gb mem

[Jima]

On Wed, 22 Mar 2006, Turbo Fredriksson wrote:
> How does this sound as a Linux machine? Stability? Scalability?
> How good is Linux/SPARC64 in taking advantage of this amount
> of CPU's? I've heard that Linux scales up to 32 CPU's (old number?)
> but I guess that's on x86, not SPARC64?
>
> Would it (Linux) even run on such a machine?
--- snip ---

  I don't have any hardware that...big...but I did remember hearing from 
someone who did:

http://lists.auroralinux.org/pipermail/aurora-sparc-devel/2005-September/000285.html
http://lists.auroralinux.org/pipermail/aurora-sparc-user/2005-September/003436.html

  Many thanks to Lamar Owen of Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute for 
being so forthcoming with his findings. :)

      Jima

Re: Sun Enterprise 6500. 10xUltraSPARC/400MHz, 10Gb mem

[Dennis Gilmore]

On Wednesday 22 March 2006 12:13, Turbo Fredriksson wrote:
> How does this sound as a Linux machine? Stability? Scalability?
> How good is Linux/SPARC64 in taking advantage of this amount
> of CPU's? I've heard that Linux scales up to 32 CPU's (old number?)
> but I guess that's on x86, not SPARC64?
>
>
> Would it (Linux) even run on such a machine? I've tried getting
> it to work on a E3000, but is getting huge problems with the SCSI
> interface (esp if I remember correctly)...

I have a E3000i had some issues with the scsi bus  i resolved them  by 
terminating the external scsi bus  with a scsi terminator.

Its  been running for months now.

-- 
Regards

Dennis Gilmore,  RHCE
Proud Australian

Re: Sun Enterprise 6500. 10xUltraSPARC/400MHz, 10Gb mem

[David S. Miller]

From: Turbo Fredriksson <turbo@swe.net>
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 19:13:36 +0100

> Would it (Linux) even run on such a machine?

It should run just fine.  I highly recommend the current
Ubuntu dapper drake release, due to the Niagara port a lot
of bug fixing and stress testing on high arity SMP systems
has occurred for the kernel being used there.

Re: Sun Enterprise 6500. 10xUltraSPARC/400MHz, 10Gb mem

[Lamar Owen]

On Wednesday 22 March 2006 15:20, David S. Miller wrote:
> From: Turbo Fredriksson <turbo@swe.net>
> Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 19:13:36 +0100
>
> > Would it (Linux) even run on such a machine?
>
> It should run just fine.  I highly recommend the current
> Ubuntu dapper drake release, due to the Niagara port a lot
> of bug fixing and stress testing on high arity SMP systems
> has occurred for the kernel being used there.

For others who might not know of the Ubuntu SPARC porting project, please see 
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/2005-October/000040.html

Looks nice; something I'll end up testing, probably, being that I have a a 
trio of large Enterprise boxes in my server room for such purposes.  They are 
all currently running Aurora 2.0beta2.

However, Dave, I wouldn't call Dapper a release as yet; I know you are excited 
and thrilled at Linus pulling the Niagara patches into the main tree 
(woohoo!), and having a nice distribution like Ubuntu available for these 
venerable SPARC beasts is marvelous, but having to netboot and netinstall 
means to me that it's probably not ready for production (this is, again, 
mostly for the edification of others on the list).  Nor for that matter is 
Aurora 2.0beta2, or CentOS 4.2beta, or much of the other modern Linuxen for 
SPARCs.  YMMV.

In my case, Aurora 2.0beta2 has proven stable on my E6500 and E5500 in my 
server room; to the OP I say that yes it works fine, but over 8 CPU's with 
the Aurora 2.0beta2 kernel is thought to potentially be unstable;  I can't 
confirm that, as I've run with up to 14 CPU's at a time, but had some 
hardware problems with a couple of CPU/RAM boards.
-- 
Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC  28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu

Re: Sun Enterprise 6500. 10xUltraSPARC/400MHz, 10Gb mem

[David S. Miller]

From: Lamar Owen <lowen@pari.edu>
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 14:29:38 -0500

> but having to netboot and netinstall 
> means to me that it's probably not ready for production

The CDROM images boot just fine and I absolutely challenge you find a
way to crash a Niagara machine running the current Dapper release.

Re: Sun Enterprise 6500. 10xUltraSPARC/400MHz, 10Gb mem

[Lamar Owen]

On Thursday 23 March 2006 15:11, David S. Miller wrote:
> From: Lamar Owen <lowen@pari.edu>
> Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 14:29:38 -0500
>
> > but having to netboot and netinstall
> > means to me that it's probably not ready for production

> The CDROM images boot just fine and I absolutely challenge you find a
> way to crash a Niagara machine running the current Dapper release.

Certainly no offense intended, David, as to the kernel's stability.  But a 
distribution is far more than a kernel, and the whole system's stability 
depends on the whole distribution, and particularly on the compiler chain and 
glibc.

Unless you have access to some images that are not public, the latest Dapper 
on ports.ubuntu.com, dated yesterday, does not include full installer CDROMS;  
you have the choice to either netboot and netinstall, or boot the mini.iso 
and netinstall.  I'll consider it for production when two things happen:
1.) Dapper Drake itself is fully released in non-alpha non-beta form;
2.) The SPARC port is released in non-alpha non-beta full installer form.

From my vantage point, there are very few SPARC Linux distributions that 
qualify for production.  The current Debian STABLE is one of them, as is 
Aurora 1.0.  I have not had the time to do any stage Gentoo to comment on its 
stability.  Out of sheer necessity I am running a box in production on Aurora 
1.92, and it has proven stable; Aurora 2.0 looks promising as well.  And, 
again, once Ubuntu SPARC has its non-beta release it will likewise be 
considered; although I might grab it to experiment.

As far as the kernel is concerned, you are almost assuredly completely correct 
as to its stability (you would be the one person who could be that sure); but 
there's more than a kernel I have to think about.

I'm not as nearly concerned with Niagara stability as I am with sun4u Ex500 
stability, since I have the latter and depend upon the latter.  However, this 
is very good to know for those using any SPARC box with a large number of 
processors, and it is absolutely wonderful that you have it working that well 
on that processor.
-- 
Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC  28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu

Re: Sun Enterprise 6500. 10xUltraSPARC/400MHz, 10Gb mem

[Dennis Jenkins]

--- Turbo Fredriksson <turbo@swe.net> wrote:

> How does this sound as a Linux machine? Stability?
> Scalability?
> How good is Linux/SPARC64 in taking advantage of
> this amount
> of CPU's? I've heard that Linux scales up to 32
> CPU's (old number?)
> but I guess that's on x86, not SPARC64?
> 
> 
> Would it (Linux) even run on such a machine? I've
> tried getting
> it to work on a E3000, but is getting huge problems
> with the SCSI
> interface (esp if I remember correctly)...
> This was a friends machine, and I was only called in
> as help. Never
> got it to work correctly with any of the standard
> Debian GNU/Linux
> kernels we tried. Next step was to make a custom
> kernel, but friend
> travels a lot so there's little time to work on
> this.
> Now he's shopping for a E6500 (eBay). But I'm a
> little skeptical
> on getting it to work (at all and/or good). Any
> pointers? Ideas?
> -
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line
> "unsubscribe sparclinux" in
> the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
> More majordomo info at 
> http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
> 

I have a 8 processor E3500.  Linux (Gentoo for me)
works great, except that it CAN NOT use the internal
Fiber Channel disk array.  (I've been told that the
2.2 kernel series used to work, but I don't want to
run a kernel that old).  Really sucks two, as my box
as 8x 18.2G drives.

The damn thing could probably heat my house in the
winter.  The power supply is almost 2 Kilowatts.  The
little air vents at teh bottom make nice foot warmers.

Doing a "make -j8" is very satisfying.

Just remember that the CPUs themselves run at 334MHz
or 400 MHZ.  An E6500 only does 334MHz b/c the
back-plane is too long to support faster CPUs.  Not
sure why yours does 400MHz.  The backplane can move
3GB/s.  The box is not super fast at raw # crunching. 
The total bogomips are only twice that of my AMD
Athlon 1.4GHz.  However, the sun box can do termendous
I/O.  In my opnion, the box would make a great
database server, but would not be useful for high-end
math or 3-d applications.



Dennis Jenkins

Re: Sun Enterprise 6500. 10xUltraSPARC/400MHz, 10Gb mem

[Lamar Owen]

On Thursday 23 March 2006 23:08, Dennis Jenkins wrote:
> I have a 8 processor E3500.  Linux (Gentoo for me)
> works great, except that it CAN NOT use the internal
> Fiber Channel disk array.  

Where did this information come from?  I also have an E3500, and four 36.4GB 
drives....

> Just remember that the CPUs themselves run at 334MHz
> or 400 MHZ.  An E6500 only does 334MHz b/c the
> back-plane is too long to support faster CPUs.

The 400MHz/8MB cache CPU's can do a 5x multiplier with the right clock board, 
with the gigaplane running at 80MHz and the CPU's at 400.  This is what I 
have in mine.

> I/O.  In my opnion, the box would make a great
> database server, but would not be useful for high-end
> math or 3-d applications.

Mine is going to be a Plone ZEO client cluster, fronted by Pound.
-- 
Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC  28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu

Re: Sun Enterprise 6500. 10xUltraSPARC/400MHz, 10Gb mem

[David S. Miller]

From: Lamar Owen <lowen@pari.edu>
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 14:08:46 -0500

> On Thursday 23 March 2006 23:08, Dennis Jenkins wrote:
> > I have a 8 processor E3500.  Linux (Gentoo for me)
> > works great, except that it CAN NOT use the internal
> > Fiber Channel disk array.  
> 
> Where did this information come from?  I also have an E3500, and four 36.4GB 
> drives....

The SOC/SOC+ drivers are known to be busted. Ben Collins and
I have taken stabs recently to try and get it working with
only limited luck.

And even if we get it working, folks will need to extract the SOC/SOC+
firmware out of the Solaris driver by hand and include it into a
custom build of the Linux driver in order to get a working setup.

Re: Sun Enterprise 6500. 10xUltraSPARC/400MHz, 10Gb mem

[Lamar Owen]

On Friday 24 March 2006 17:33, David S. Miller wrote:
> The SOC/SOC+ drivers are known to be busted. Ben Collins and
> I have taken stabs recently to try and get it working with
> only limited luck.

> And even if we get it working, folks will need to extract the SOC/SOC+
> firmware out of the Solaris driver by hand and include it into a
> custom build of the Linux driver in order to get a working setup.

Thanks for the confirmation.  To anyone's knowledge, is there a non-busted 
SBUS FC-AL driver out there (perhaps for the JNI cards)?
-- 
Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC  28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu

Re: Sun Enterprise 6500. 10xUltraSPARC/400MHz, 10Gb mem

[David S. Miller]

From: Lamar Owen <lowen@pari.edu>
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 19:30:25 -0500

> Thanks for the confirmation.  To anyone's knowledge, is there a
> non-busted SBUS FC-AL driver out there (perhaps for the JNI cards)?

Not really, sorry.