Newbie to FreeBSD on SPARC - questions about Sun hardware

[Marius Strobl]

On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 02:24:05AM +0200, Kaya Saman wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm quite new to FreeBSD as the only things that I've done are a lot of 
> research and created a radio from it on an x86 box!
> 
> I run a few SPARC based systems currently which run a combination of 
> OpenSolaris, SXCE, Solaris9 and 10 and am planning to upgrade to more 
> Sun hardware pretty soon within the next few weeks.
> 
> I plan to grab a Fire V480 and use it as a mainframe server so I have to 
> ask about the compatibility of Sun hardware and FreeBSD SPARC port??

FreeBSD currently crashes on older models of V480 when attempting
to use an on-board NIC due to what appears to be a CPU bug which
needs to be worked around. It appears to work fine on later V480
equipped with version 7 Schizo bridges (that's just an indicator
and unlikely related to the problem) though, but FreeBSD 7.3 will
be the first release (besides the current stable branches) to work
with their changed firmware behavior. Linux doesn't seem to do any
better in this regard:
http://marc.info/?l=linux-sparc&m=122220796209509&w=2
http://lists.debian.org/debian-sparc/2009/12/msg00012.html

Marius