[9fans] fileserver hardware question (Sun)

[9fans] fileserver hardware question (Sun)

[Robby]

Hi,

I'm planning to set up a network at home and was wondering if it is
easy to set up a Sun server as a Plan 9 file server machine? The specs
are:

Sun E150
167MHz Ultra 1 processor, 512KB Cache
256MB RAM (all Sun)
1 x Builtin 10BaseT ethernet
2 x Sun SWIFT 10-100BaseT ethernet/Fast Wide SCSI-2 SBus card
1 x Sun 2GB 7200rpm UltraScsi system disk
and some Sun 4GB 7200rpm UltraScsi internal disks

Since I've never seriously played with a Sun box, I'm slightly wary
of just jumping in.

Thanks for any insight,
Robby

Re: [9fans] fileserver hardware question (Sun)

[C H Forsyth]

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you'll have your work cut out: the current version
of the system has not (to my knowledge) been ported
to a Sun, and the older versions didn't run on an Ultra.
in short, i think you'd need to do the port!
it might be a good introduction to many aspects of the
system, but it is probably more than you were seeking!

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From: Robby <rtr@blueyonder.co.uk>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: [9fans] fileserver hardware question (Sun)
Date: Fri, 6 Sep 2002 09:58:06 GMT
Message-ID: <zY_d9.2125$az2.19098738@news-text.cableinet.net>

Hi,

I'm planning to set up a network at home and was wondering if it is
easy to set up a Sun server as a Plan 9 file server machine? The specs
are:

Sun E150
167MHz Ultra 1 processor, 512KB Cache
256MB RAM (all Sun)
1 x Builtin 10BaseT ethernet
2 x Sun SWIFT 10-100BaseT ethernet/Fast Wide SCSI-2 SBus card
1 x Sun 2GB 7200rpm UltraScsi system disk
and some Sun 4GB 7200rpm UltraScsi internal disks

Since I've never seriously played with a Sun box, I'm slightly wary
of just jumping in.

Thanks for any insight,
Robby

Re: [9fans] fileserver hardware question (Sun)

[Robby]

In article <31aad20180d266d0e908476bf6157498@vitanuova.com>,
	forsyth@vitanuova.com (C H Forsyth) writes:
> you'll have your work cut out: the current version
> of the system has not (to my knowledge) been ported
> to a Sun, and the older versions didn't run on an Ultra.
> in short, i think you'd need to do the port!
> it might be a good introduction to many aspects of the
> system, but it is probably more than you were seeking!

Ah, thanks. I didn't manage to get my hands on the machine after all.
So, looks like I need to look elsewhere for some kit. I think I'll try
and stick to the known to work hardware.

Thank you anyway,
Robby

Re: [9fans] fileserver hardware question (Sun)

[Peter Downs]

I'm also interested in getting Plan 9 running on some Sun hardware.
Specificially, I have a sparcstation 5 and sparcstation 10.

I know C, but I've never worked on any operating system porting projects,
so I'm not exactly sure where one starts.  Cross compile the kernel, then the
compiler, then recompile natively, recoding where necessary?

Is there a good document out there on porting Plan 9, or should I get ideas from
other projects like netbsd and linux?

I suppose I also need to get my hands on a sparc ISA doc.

--peter

--
perl -ne'chomp;$a.=pack"h*",$_;END{print"\n$a\n\n"}'<<EOM
05564756270244f677e637a0
55e49485023597374756d637021446d696e6963747271647f627a0
55e6966756273796479702f666023547e2024586f6d61637a0
635313e2936323e263233393a0
EOM

Re: [9fans] fileserver hardware question (Sun)

[Geoff Collyer]

Compiling and cross-compiling are pretty much the same thing on Plan
9, and there already exists a sparc compiler, so don't get hung up on
the compiler (I'm assuming you can scrounge a PC for Plan 9 at least
temporarily as a place to start from).

The first thing I'd do is make sure that I had a full description of
how the processor and related hardware work: how do you control the
MMU (in painful detail), how do you control any bus interfaces (e.g.,
SBus), do you have documentation sufficient to write a driver for the
interesting peripherals (e.g., Ethernet, video interface), what's the
layout of the physical address space?  For a Sun, this information may
be scattered, but good places to look would be the two existing Plan 9
ports to older Suns (in /n/sources/extra*), Solaris or old SunOS
include files, the parts of the Solaris kernel that Sun distributes
under its odd not-quite-open-source terms, ports of the various BSDs
and possibly Linux.  Sun's own documentation was never very helpful in
key areas (e.g., MMU) that Sun considered proprietary and valuable.
Note that Sun published at least one paper on a reference MMU design
that, as far as I know, they never actually used to build an MMU.

Re: [9fans] fileserver hardware question (Sun)

[Peter Downs]

On Fri, Sep 06, 2002 at 03:43:26PM -0700, Geoff Collyer wrote:
> Compiling and cross-compiling are pretty much the same thing on Plan
> 9, and there already exists a sparc compiler, so don't get hung up on
> the compiler (I'm assuming you can scrounge a PC for Plan 9 at least
> temporarily as a place to start from).

Which isa does the sparc compiler work for?  Was it designed for 32 or 64 bit?
microsparc or ultrasparc?

peter

Re: [9fans] fileserver hardware question (Sun)

[Scott Schwartz]

| Which isa does the sparc compiler work for?  Was it designed for 32 or 64 bit?
| microsparc or ultrasparc?

32bit, non-ultra.  Plan 9 worked great on ss2 and slc systems.

Re: [9fans] fileserver hardware question (Sun)

[John Packer]

It's a sparc v8, 32 bit compiler.  It wouldn't support ultrasparc
kernels.


On Tuesday, September 10, 2002, at 07:45 PM, Peter Downs wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 06, 2002 at 03:43:26PM -0700, Geoff Collyer wrote:
>> Compiling and cross-compiling are pretty much the same thing on Plan
>> 9, and there already exists a sparc compiler, so don't get hung up on
>> the compiler (I'm assuming you can scrounge a PC for Plan 9 at least
>> temporarily as a place to start from).
>
> Which isa does the sparc compiler work for?  Was it designed for 32 or
> 64 bit?
> microsparc or ultrasparc?
>
> peter

Re: [9fans] fileserver hardware question (Sun)

[Peter Downs]

On Tue, Sep 10, 2002 at 08:14:28PM -0400, John Packer wrote:
> It's a sparc v8, 32 bit compiler.  It wouldn't support ultrasparc
> kernels.

So, then, the logical next step is to write a sparcv9 compiler to add to
the collection.  That work being aside from porting the current plan 9 to
microsparc.

peter