Last week there were news about Linux on SPARC. Oracle announced their Oracle Linux 6.7 as GA with the Oracle Enterprise Unbreakable Linux Kernel for SPARC T5 and T7 based servers.
This release supports the build in SPARC features like secure memory, the DAX engines and the crypto co processers on Oracle’s own CPUs. You could install it bare metal or in an OVM / LDOM guest. It also comes with support for the LDOM manager so you could use it as a primary domain.
I gave it try on my old T2 server but the installation failed installing grub on that old platform. I tried to manually install grub2 but got a lot of errors with the sun labed vdisk.
So I tried it on a T7-2 server in a LDOM and there everything worked fine.
[root@linux0 ~]# cat /etc/oracle-release Oracle Linux Server release 6.7 [root@linux0 ~]# [root@linux0 ~]# uname -a Linux linux0 2.6.39-500.1.76.el6uek.sparc64 #1 SMP Fri Dec 16 10:47:54 EST 2016 sparc64 sparc64 sparc64 GNU/Linux [root@linux0 ~]# cat /proc/cpuinfo cpu : SPARC-M7 fpu : SPARC-M7 integrated FPU pmu : sparc-m7 prom : OBP 4.40.1 2016/04/25 06:45 type : sun4v ncpus probed : 16 ncpus active : 16 D$ parity tl1 : 0 I$ parity tl1 : 0 cpucaps : flush,stbar,swap,muldiv,v9,blkinit,n2,mul32,div32,v8plus,popc,vis,vis2,ASIBlkInit,fmaf,vis3,hpc,ima,pause,cbcond,adp,aes,des,camellia,md5,sha1,sha256,sha512,mpmul,montmul,montsqr,crc32c Cpu0ClkTck : 00000000f65c15b0 Cpu1ClkTck : 00000000f65c15b0 Cpu2ClkTck : 00000000f65c15b0 Cpu3ClkTck : 00000000f65c15b0 Cpu4ClkTck : 00000000f65c15b0 Cpu5ClkTck : 00000000f65c15b0 Cpu6ClkTck : 00000000f65c15b0 Cpu7ClkTck : 00000000f65c15b0 Cpu8ClkTck : 00000000f65c15b0 Cpu9ClkTck : 00000000f65c15b0 Cpu10ClkTck : 00000000f65c15b0 Cpu11ClkTck : 00000000f65c15b0 Cpu12ClkTck : 00000000f65c15b0 Cpu13ClkTck : 00000000f65c15b0 Cpu14ClkTck : 00000000f65c15b0 Cpu15ClkTck : 00000000f65c15b0 MMU Type : Hypervisor (sun4v) MMU PGSZs : 8K,64K,4MB,256MB,2GB,16GB State: CPU0: online CPU1: online CPU2: online CPU3: online CPU4: online CPU5: online CPU6: online CPU7: online CPU8: online CPU9: online CPU10: online CPU11: online CPU12: online CPU13: online CPU14: online CPU15: online [root@linux0 ~]# [root@linux0 /]# lscpu Architecture: sparc64 CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bit Byte Order: Big Endian CPU(s): 16 On-line CPU(s) list: 0-15 Thread(s) per core: 8 Core(s) per socket: 2 Socket(s): 1 NUMA node(s): 1 L0 cache: 16384 L1i cache: 16384 L2 cache: 262144 L3 cache: 8388608 NUMA node0 CPU(s): 0-15 [root@linux0 /]#
What did not work was the dynamic reconfiguration:
root@primary:~# ldm set-core 4 linux0 Domain linux0 is unable to dynamically reconfigure VCPUs. Please verify the guest operating system is running and supports VCPU DR. root@primary:~# ldm set-memory 6g linux0 The linux0 domain does not support the dynamic reconfiguration of memory. root@primary:~#
I am not really sure why Oracle released “such an old version”. No UEK 3 or 4, just the 2.6, but at least the latest 2.6.39… I am running a beta SPARC linux from Oracle which was avaiable since 2015 and within this release you get 4.1. But the system uses silo (a SPARC lilo boot loader) not grub2 like OL 6.7 for SPARC.
[root@linux1 ~]# cat /etc/redhat-release Linux for SPARC release 1.0 [root@linux1 ~]# uname -a Linux linux1 4.1.12-32.el6uek.sparc64 #1 SMP Thu Dec 17 19:27:27 PST 2015 sparc64 sparc64 sparc64 GNU/Linux [root@linux1 ~]# [root@linux1 ~]# cat /proc/cpuinfo cpu : UltraSparc T2 (Niagara2) fpu : UltraSparc T2 integrated FPU pmu : niagara2 prom : OBP 4.30.8.a 2010/05/13 10:36 type : sun4v ncpus probed : 8 ncpus active : 8 D$ parity tl1 : 0 I$ parity tl1 : 0 cpucaps : flush,stbar,swap,muldiv,v9,blkinit,n2,mul32,div32,v8plus,popc,vis,vis2,ASIBlkInit Cpu0ClkTck : 00000000457646c0 Cpu1ClkTck : 00000000457646c0 Cpu2ClkTck : 00000000457646c0 Cpu3ClkTck : 00000000457646c0 Cpu4ClkTck : 00000000457646c0 Cpu5ClkTck : 00000000457646c0 Cpu6ClkTck : 00000000457646c0 Cpu7ClkTck : 00000000457646c0 MMU Type : Hypervisor (sun4v) MMU PGSZs : 8K,64K,4MB,256MB State: CPU0: online CPU1: online CPU2: online CPU3: online CPU4: online CPU5: online CPU6: online CPU7: online [root@linux1 ~]# [root@linux1 ~]# lscpu Architecture: CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bit Byte Order: Big Endian CPU(s): 8 On-line CPU(s) list: 0-7 Thread(s) per core: 4 Core(s) per socket: 2 Socket(s): 1 NUMA node(s): 1 NUMA node0 CPU(s): 0-63 [root@linux1 ~]#
So let’s see what will happen. I am still not sure if I should like it or not 🙂