Re: Current state of the Linux kernel on SPARC

Hello,

On Tue, 2025-08-26 at 13:49 -0400, Dennis Clarke wrote:
>      Thank you very much for this detailed update. I have had a SPARC
> server ( or two or seven ) running somewhere but the problems are, how
> may I say it? The problems are always numerous. It is just a real pain
> to keep one of those running much of anything anymore. Your detailed
> update gives me the notion that a decently fast machine may exist that
> will run Linux in a reasonable fashion. Maybe. This could just be yet
> another total waste of time and money. That is the nature of Linux on
> SPARC these days.

It's very likely that most of the issues you've been seeing are due to the
bugs in the exception reporting assembly code that Michael Karcher just
fixed [1].

I'm currently preparing a test kernel which you can and should test.

We need to verify the kernel on:

- UltraSPARC I or II
- UltraSPARC III
- Niagara 1 (SPARC T1)
- Niagara 4 (SPARC T4)

>      Having said all of that I wonder if anyone has run Linux on the more
> recently built ORACLE S7-2 type servers? I think the people at Oracle
> may have released a variant of ORACLE Linux ( read that as Red Hat ) for
> SPARC just for this machine. However the code changes required for that
> to work may be locked away on Larry's island. Who knows.
> 
>      So has anyone managed to get Linux running on the S7-2 type unit?

Linux should run fine on the SPARC S7-2 at least inside an LDOM. For bare-metal,
we might have to cherry-pick some patches from Oracle's UEK kernel.

Adrian

> [1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/[email protected]/

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