Sun Fire V480 compatibility question?

[Marius Strobl]

On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 09:45:07PM +0200, Kaya Saman wrote:
> 
> Just some more quick questions if you don't mind:
> 
> Can I add extra NICs to the v480 that will work with BSD - provided I 
> have a bridge that is supported?

Yes, NICs driven by drivers included in GENERIC should work fine:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/sparc64/conf/GENERIC

V480 with version 4 Schizos also seem to work fine with Sun HME
NICs (which are 32-bit) when leaving the on-board Cassini+ alone,
which would be in line with the information provide for BugID
4898531.

> 
> Last question is can I virtualize on this machine?? Obviously things 
> like Xen, Vbox, VMware, Xvm are all built for x86 machines but I have 
> heard about LDoms although I don't know if they will work with SPARC or 
> the v480 and most importantly BSD.

With FreeBSD 8.0 it might be possible to use VIMAGE but I don't
know how mature this generally is, I just know that a sparc64
kernel with options VIMAGE at least doesn't instantly blow :)
Otherwise you are limited to FreeBSD jails at best.

> 
> According to this: 
> http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/data/v12n/views/v12n_ldoms.page1.html
> 
> it only supports Linux and Solaris?

LDom support requires some changes to the boot loader and the
kernel not present in FreeBSD so far.

Marius