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 🙂
Hi there,
I realise the T2 is really old by now but I obtained a Netra T5220 recently in a bunch of hardware I got for free, and I love free stuff! Considering the epic specs at the time of launch (still rather impressive by today’s standards I rate), and also considering how damn cool the thing looks, I would like to put it to work in my home network, and was hoping for some advice!
Firstly, I know this particular version used LDOMs, do you know if Oracle VM server is supported on this platform or am I stuck with LDOM? I see according to Oracle’s wiki, T2 does support VM manager, haven’t been able to find how to update from LDOM to VMM though. I still need to reset the LDOM root password to get access, and from there will be reinstalling Solaris. Any recommendations on version (based on below use cases)?
I would like to use this server within my home network, and to replace a lot of the physical devices I am currently using with VM’s, including my QNAP (used solely to record CCTV footage from my cameras), which I would love to be able to replace with Zoneminder on a Linux VM. I also have a few older Supermicro blades which run a mixture of Centos and Debian, used as testing environments for projects I am busy with for work (I work in the ICT sector, primarily on Asterisk based SaaS solutions for call and contact centres) and would love to be able to virtualise these as well. I am a die hard techie and like most die hards I hoard tech. Thankfully in my field, and because we have made a big move from on-prem to SaaS, there is an endless supply of free stuff, and what better than to use it yourself. My home network is running on Juniper and Aruba gear I was lucky enough to “inherit” as well, to give you an idea 😀
I don’t have the budget to be running newer hardware (I have no budget for anything tech at home, my wife would kill me :D), also, tech is expensive here in South Africa, and so I would love to repurpose the Netra and use it as a single platform to replace the odd collection of hardware I currently use. Any advice or input you have would be greatly appreciated. I don’t have much Solaris experience, but I am a hardcore Linux sysadmin from the old days, and pretty much everything I work with runs on Linux, so its not a huge shift for me.
Looking forward to your response and advice! Huge thanks in advance!
Hi Nick,
always good to get free things ^^
it’s quite an old box, but really really a solid one. Specially the Netra series is/was carrier-grade NEBS Level 3 certified, what is essential for equipment in tough environments.
@OVM vs. LDOM
Oracle VM is more like a marketing name, internally everyone still speak about LDOMs and all commands are done using the command “ldm” or starting with “ldm“. Oracle started calling it OVM together with their XEN implementation on x86 and invented a tool called OVM Manager which could handle XEN on x86 and LDOMs on SPARC in a web-based GUI. But you don’t need that to configure or run your own LDOMs. The hypervisor version is limited by your hardware, the software stack comes with Solaris itself and is updated together.
Unfortunately I have bad news; Oracle gives only paying customers access to updates and patches.
And Oracle does not support the latest Solaris 11.4 on your box – so you will have to go with 11.3 – but again you won’t get patches from Oracle. To administrate LDOMs you will have to run Solaris in the so called primary domain, but you could run any Linux or BSD if you find a SPARC port for it.
I hope you will have much fun with your SPARC, it’s really a great platform with a lot of nice features…
-> No RISC no fun ^^
Greetings from Vienna/Austria/Europe
Regards