FC4 and Solaris 10 on the Sager 8890?

[Chenar]

Hiya folks,
I need a little help.

First a little background. I've recently become enamoured with Solaris 10 after installing it on a Sun E420R in my basement, and wanted to check out the x86 version on my lappy. So, I checked the HCL, and it looks like there are people running it on the 8890, but I can't seem to get it to acknowledge the hard drives. I even backed up my entire box and disabled the RAID controller in the hopes that Solaris would recognize the drives if they weren't striped. Sadly not.

[edit:] FC4 is working now. The partition table was buggered, but a repartition/reinstall make it all happy. FC4 even detected the 8890's TV tuner. I'm very impressed with it so far. Now, on to Solaris!

Thanks in advance for any help/suggestions!

[T_S_Kimball]

Evening,

Well, Solaris/SPARC is quite a different animal from Solaris/x86. However it would appear that the install process for x86 has gotten better with v10.

I've not yet tried Sol10 on the 8890. Sol8 failed miserably, did not like the Promise at *all* (said no disks). There was an 8890 on Sun's user-contributed HCL listing, but two things came up:

- Hyperthreading must be disabled in BIOS. That's a bit of a showstopper really, better off with Linux and getting SMP kernel to work.
- Stock ATI drivers apparently was not possible (this may have been fixed in Sol10), and you'd have to get the Xfree software installed instead to get a WM.

BTW, I deal with SPARC servers for a living, and am surprised to see that *someone* likes the 420. Be *VERY* careful with that memory riser card, its awful and very tricky (Sun sends replacements out as consumables, no return). The quad CPU is nice though, if you're just fiddling. :)

Good Luck,
--TSK

[Chenar]

Gave up on getting Solaris 10 on my 8890. The installer absolutely refused to acknowledge my hard drives, even with the raid disabled, so I went back to gentoo on my baby.

The 420r definately has some issues, though not with the memory riser... The problem is either with the scsi backplane, or the harddrive itself. The drive doesn't seem to spin up, or present itself to the controller most of the time. Once it's running/booted it's rock solid, but getting it to recognize it's drive initially (or at reboot) is a real pain.