Using Creator 3D on an Ultra 1E?

[Marius Strobl]

On Wed, Oct 27, 2004 at 02:12:46PM +0200, Torfinn Ingolfsen wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I have always  wanted to get myself a 64 bit machine to run FreeBSD on,
> but haven't been able to justify the expense of a new machine. Recently,
> I was given a Sun Ultra 1E Creator 3D. I already runs FreeBSD (installed
> via serial console):
> user at ultra1$ uname -a
> FreeBSD ultra1.kg4.no 5.3-BETA7 FreeBSD 5.3-BETA7 #0: Sun Oct  3
> 11:24:02 UTC 2004    
> root at bobbi.cse.buffalo.edu:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  sparc64
> 
> The machine isn't very fast, but it works.
> And today, I have gotten a "Sun framebuffer to VGA monitor" adapter, so
> now I want to test the Creator 3D, to see if it will work. I discovered
> that there is no output from the framebuffer as default (hey, I just
> *had* to try), so I guess I'll have to do some work to get this set up.
> Perhaps make a new kernel?
> 

Keyboard and mouse on SBus-based machines unfortunately don't work
under FreeBSD, yet. So you can't use syscons(4) or X on this machine
at present. The ofw_console(4) driver will use the keyboard and the
creator card via Open Firmware if you set "input-device" to "keyboard"
and "output-device" to "screen" in the Open Firmware boot monitor or
via eeprom(8) but this will be slow (should improve a bit if you
compile a kernel with "option OFWCONS_POLL_HZ=20") and means no X.