CRUX/SPARC - A Port of CRUX to Sparc64

This page contains some information regarding the port of CRUX to Sun Microsystems' Sparc64 architecture. Have a look here.

CRUX/SPARC 2.1rc1 is out, and appears to work fine; that said, I installed and run it on my blade 100.

All ports of the original CRUX base have been ported, except for those that are x86 specific: bin86 and lilo. In addition, silo (Sparc Improved linux LOader) and sparc-utils are available, plus binutils64 and gcc-sparc64 to compile a 64-bit kernel; note that the userland is 32-bit for now.

Regarding opt, all ports are there except for cvsup.

I've started to prepare ports trees for base, opt and CLC's contrib. Please note that the 'maintainer' mentioned in the Pkgfile didn't do the Sparc testing, so please contact me if you have problems with certain ports. If you tested additional ports from contrib, please let me know and I'll add them.

Ports: Ports trees are in subversion now; the respective files are included on the ISO, just make sure you install opt/expat, opt/openssl, contrib/apr, contrib/neon and contrib/subversion.

• base
• opt
• contrib

Finally, the kernel is 2.6.7, and glibc has no NPTL support

• Kernel 2.6.11.7: framebuffer doesn't work yet
• silo boot message not displayed
• Installation via serial console fails (export TERM=lft to work around)
• x11 won't compile without changing /usr/include/linux/pci.h ('#define __bitwise' should be enough

In the coming weeks, the main focus will be to do testing and organize a small project to maintain more ports (especially for contrib).

A few notes on installation:

• there are a few things to remember when preparing the harddisks with fdisk; make sure you read and understood the chapter on it from the Gentoo SPARC Handbook
• If you didn't see the hints on the filesystem choice, go back to the Gentoo SPARC Handbook.
• DMA can make problems. My Blade 100 would freeze hard with DMA, so I disabled it (addendum: after running it for a while with DMA enabled, I had no problems; this doesn't mean anything, though; keep on testing)
• The Kernel on the ISO is based on a kernel configuration provided by a gentoo sparc developer; it contains support for most hardware on my blade 100, so chances are you can copy the kernel image and its modules and get a usable machine.
• A simple 'date -s' often made the system hang (both on gentoo and crux). Note sure why.
• The expert3d-lite which was in my blade 100 didn't like the framebuffer; there's a 'cruxnofb' kernel option on the boot ISO which seems to work around that..

Soon. Really. US (morpheus.net):
ISO image (230 MB)
md5sum
README files

CRUX, the base of it all: More info
CRUX Linux Community (CLC): Contrib ports
Robert Zalesny has started another port of CRUX to UltraSPARC: More info
Gentoo's installation handbook contains a lot of information, and is defintely worth reading: Gentoo SPARC Handbook
Kernel configurations for many sun systems: configs

Working:

• Sun Blade 100 [dmesg] [pci]
• Sun Ultra 5 model 360 [dmesg] [pci]
• Sun Ultra 5 [dmesg] [pci]

Known problems

• on the u5/360 the mouse must be unplugged and plugged back in to work after a fresh boot

Q:How do I boot from the cdrom?
A:Hit 'stop-a' during the boot up