Re: Hefty Big Iron Sun Machines.

On Sat, 2005-08-27 at 18:21 -0400, Lamar Owen wrote:

> E6500 w/8 400MHz/8MB cache CPU's
> E5500 w/6 400MHz/8MB cache CPU's
> E6000 w/6 336MHz/4MB cache CPU's
> 2x E3500 (336 and 250MHz cpus, with 4 CPU's each)
> E3000 w 6 250MHz CPU's
> 3x E450 w 2 400MHz CPU's (according to the handbook, these CPU's don't 
> exist...501-5239 :-))

That's a heck of a nice donation. :)

> A box of what appears to be 400MHz/4MB cache CPU's, around 28-30 in the box, 
> along with a pair of the special torque screwdrivers needed to change CPU's 
> on the cards.
> 
> By cannibalizing the 5500 and the two 3500's, and by going to the 4MB cache 
> 400MHz CPU's, I can possibly do 24 CPU's in the 6500

I wouldn't go more than 24. Right now, we're building the SMP kernels to
max out at 24, because of strange compile errors (which may be gone,
don't know).

> Now, I mention the CentOS list for a reason.  There is a porting effort to put 
> CentOS 4 (a from source rebuild of Red Hat's EL4) on SPARC.  Now, I have used 
> Aurora for some time now; I also use CentOS 4 on Intel (and soon on Alpha).  
> While I would like to continue to run Aurora on my production mail server 
> (which will be moved over to something bigger, either one of the EX500's or 
> one of the E450's), I am not at all averse to running CentOS on the beast.  
> 
> Now, my question to spot is simply this: if I provide the capability to build 
> Aurora packages on, say, the E6500, what version does the box need to be 
> running?  If it is running CentOS 4, will that present any technical problems 
> to building Aurora packages?  (Since CentOS 4 has FC2 and FC3 in its 
> heritage).  Further, I have offered the use of the beast to help build 
> CentOS4 packages; any problem with that, spot?

It depends on how the buildsystems are setup. Dan Williams has been
pooling the Aurora resources within Red Hat using plague and mock to set
up an Aurora buildsystem. If we can take your resources and add them to
that, then it should be possible to build Aurora packages too,
regardless of the host OS.

CentOS 4 on SPARC is going to be a more difficult issue. That will
almost certainly hit the exact same issues as the Aurora 2.0 tree, even
more if you try to use the RHEL 4 kernel SRPM as a base.

I'd prefer that people interested in SPARC focused on helping us get the
Aurora 2.0 release out. The next logical step is to get SPARC as a
supported arch for Fedora, and once that's done, it will make the task
of future CentOS builds on SPARC much simpler.

~spot
-- 
Tom "spot" Callaway: Red Hat Senior Sales Engineer || GPG ID: 93054260
Fedora Extras Steering Committee Member (RPM Standards and Practices)
Aurora Linux Project Leader: http://auroralinux.org
Lemurs, llamas, and sparcs, oh my!

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