Is it posible to run FreeBSD/sparc64 on SunFire V215?

[Marius Strobl]

On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 10:29:43AM +0400, KOT MATPOCKuH wrote:
> 2009/9/18 Marius Strobl <marius at alchemy.franken.de>:
> 
> > The main difference is that V215 are based on the 'Fire'
> > JBus to PCI-Express bridges which the mainline FreeBSD
> > doesn't have a driver for so far.
> Why is not possible to port this driver from openbsd?

Nobody said it would be impossible to port it, actually
that wouldn't make much sense though as their driver
lacks stuff and has bugs in the Fire-specific parts and
the MD and MI frameworks are incomparible anyway.

> 
> > and MSI support.
> What from this follows?

Suboptimal performance as the on-board PCI devices share
INTx interrupt lines (which up to V215 actually was
rather uncommon for sun4u machines).

On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 02:23:49PM +0400, KOT MATPOCKuH wrote:
> Hello!
>
> >> http://people.freebsd.org/~marius/v215.txt
> > Omg. I will try to repeat this :)
> I sup'ed to today CURRENT and compiled GENERIC kernel without ata,
> firewire and ipv6 support, but system again hangs after:
> OK boot -sh
> jumping to kernel entry at 0xc0080000.
>
> And... Why on my system I see "jumping...", but your system says
> "Booting [/boot/kernel/kernel]..." ?
>
> What I should do for success kernel start? :)

Like I said, mainline FreeBSD doesn't support V215 so
far. If you like you can give the following patch a try:
http://people.freebsd.org/~marius/fire.diff
It requires head r197164 or later.

>
> PS. Why net boot is too slow? Loading process occupies ~15 minutes
> from start to last message.

I don't know and it works fine here, you'd need to
analyze the network traffic in order to get an idea
which side is the culprit. IIRC I've seen similar
effects when not using the full speed of the network
interface of a sun4u machine, i.e. for example a
Gigabit Ethernet interface with a Fast Ethernet
switch, given that the loader relies on the firmware
to provide support for the NIC there isn't much that
can be done about that.

Marius