Newbie to FreeBSD on SPARC - questions about Sun hardware

[Marius Strobl]

On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 08:19:21PM +0200, Kaya Saman wrote:
> Many thanks for all the responses and the help and advice that you guys 
> have given!!! :-)
> 
> This has been one really good ride in terms of learning about what can 
> and can't be done with a server before purchasing it.
> 
> Anton Shterenlikht wrote:
> >On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 08:33:00PM +0100, Joerg Wunsch wrote:
> >  
> >>I've never run a sound driver on my Sparc hardware, so I can't tell
> >>about multimedia capabilities.  I guess now that many of the older Sun
> >>Blades have been retired from their first life, other people here
> >>probably made experience with running those under FreeBSD.
> >>    
> >
> >I've sound on blade 1500 FreeBSD 9.0-current all right.
> >
> >  
> Hi Anton isn't the current FreeBSD 8.0??
> 
> [quote]
> 
> 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
> 
> [/quote]
> 
> Thank you Marius for that information! I will be installing the latest 
> FreeBSD stable or current which is 8.0 (at least for x86) so I am not 
> sure if that will work with both new and old systems or if what you are 
> saying is that the earlier models of the V480 will not work with ANY 
> Linux or BSD version??
> 

Well, I can only speak with certainty about FreeBSD but there you
won't currently be able to use the on-board NICs of old V480.

Marius