I don’t do this very often, but I’m turning to you, lovely reader, with a rather strange, obscure, and possibly entirely stupid question. As part of the first major OSNews Patreon project, I’m looking to buy and write several articles about one of the last proper UNIX workstations, and two companies immediately come to mind – SGI and Sun. Since I’m already halfway familiar with Sun’s hardware, and since their machines are more readily available, I’ve opted to look for a proper Sun SPARC workstation.
The last true Sun UNIX workstation was the Sun Ultra 45, available with either one or two UltraSPARC IIIi processors. While these 15 year old machines are certainly readily available on eBay, they also happen to command what I think are crazy prices – the dual processor model, which is really the one you should want, goes for about €1200, which is far too pricey for what you get, and that’s excluding shipping, which often adds another several hundred dollars (and possible import taxes, to boot).
However, do you know what type of SPARC machines are not crazy expensive, and far newer, faster, and more modern to boot? That’s right – decommissioned Oracle and Fujitsu SPARC servers.
There’s tons of videos and articles out there about people buying decommissioned dual or more Xeon servers, slapping a modern graphics card in them, and use them as impractical, slow, and loud workstations or gaming machines. Basically, I want to do the same – buy something like a Sparc T4-1 server, slap some compatible GPU in it somewhere, and use it as a more impractical, slower, and louder workstation.
For science.
My question is simple. Is it possible to do this, and if so, how on earth would I find out which GPU is even compatible with Solaris or Linux on SPARC? There seems to be very little information available about this use case (I wonder why) and I’m at a loss as to how to figure something like this out.
And yes, I know this is stupid. I know this makes no sense. I know no sane person would do this. I know the world will lose nothing if I do not do this. However, if nobody wants to make proper non-x86 UNIX workstations anymore and eBay sellers want to charge a ridiculous premium for 15 year old junkers, why don’t we just build our own non-x86 UNIX workstation?
The Wrights brothers didn’t listen to all the haters, and considering this project would make about as much noise as a passenger jet, why should I? And wouldn’t you want to be part of this crazy journey? I mean, do you know anyone else crazy enough to even entertain a ridiculous, impractical, and stupid idea such as this?
I thought so.
Solaris only ever supported KMS/DRI2 on Intel hardware ( leaving the opensource NVidia and AMD without the needed in-kernel functionality) And, even then it’s been deprecated and slated for removal. That also certainly means there was never any form of KMS/DRI support on SPARC hardware. So, you’re not likely to be able to do anything useful w/r to graphics on Solaris.
Linux, however, supports AMD and NVidia GPUs. Debian sparc64 kernel packages have both the modules built and included, as well as Mesa3d packages for SPARC.
And, Blender packages as well!
Thom Holwerda,
No need to refrain from this sort of thing, many of us enjoy questions & challenges so if anything you should do it more 🙂
As for video cards on SPARC hardware, I don’t know the answer. I *may* me able to get my hands on old sparc hardware, I’d have to check. I have tons of old GPUs from system pulls you’d be welcome to, but you are on the other side of the world so it’s probably not logistically helpful.
Agreed, and I recently did a similar but not nearly as exotic project, turning a Dell tower server into a workstation for testing new OpenBSD and Haiku releases. I also had to be choosy about video cards, given the board’s measly but proprietary power supply leaving only bus-powered options on the table. I settled for a FirePro W4100, fast enough and well supported in pretty much any OS, and capable of 2Kp60 which my monitor demands. Even though the GPU had built in support for audio over DisplayPort, none of the OSes I ran on it would output audio until I added a cheap PCIe x1 sound card.
@Thom Holwerda
Personally I’d want to wait a month or so before making a final decision on whether to purchase or not after all the facts are in. It’s a good thought experiment so not necessarily stupid per se but I would be careful of letting a rush of money go to your head.
These are all long-term projects slated for at the earlier next summer.
There’s very little support anymore in Solaris 11/SPARC for graphics HW other than nominal VGA.
The real issue may be that I don’t think you really understand the magnitude of the noise those systems put out. It’s cute for a few minutes until you realize why these things exist mainly in rack farms not people desksides.
I know full well how loud they are – this is not for a let’s-use-it-every-day kind of thing – this is to learn, to play, to experiment – and to write about. I have absolutely zero interest in actively using a potential machine like this for any prolonged periods of time.
Well good luck.
There’s a VGA port in the machine that should give you somewhat workable console.
Follow your dreams I guess.
Just keep in mind that not all Sun graphics cards offer 3D acceleration under the SPARC variant of Solaris, even if they have 3D acceleration hardware. The only ones that do are the ones with an MAJC chip or 3D Labs Wildcat series chip (and of course Sun’s own Creator3D, Elite3D, and Expert3D). See here:
https://everything2.com/title/Sun+graphics+cards (ignore the SBus part, SBus systems are museum pieces)
A compatibility matrix can be found here:
https://dogemicrosystems.ca/pub/Sun/System_Handbook/Sun_syshbk_V4.1/Devices/Graphics/graphics-matrix.html
Though I admit I haven’t kept up with OpenIndiana and Solaris 11.
To clarify, OpenIndiana might (just might) have added support for more hardware while Solaris 11 may have removed (Solaris 10 was the last version of the OS pretending to cater to desktop/workstation users).
Correction: MAJC is also a Sun chip
While this would be a great fun project, if it doesn’t pan out or is just too expensive, you might also want to acquire just an old Sun SPARCstation pizza box with a cg3 or cg6 accelerator (and the relevant monitor or converter cable) and run it with either Solaris 8/9 or a modern Linux and just use it as an X terminal for a Raspberry Pi or something. It’s quite possible to actually get work done this way and it looks really cool. You could also do it with a variety of old hardware. Hell, you could even take it further and get a DEC or Wang terminal and connect it to a more powerful machine and see how much you can get done entirely in text mode!
It would be significantly slower than running the display directly on the Raspberry to begin with LOL.
javiercero1,
That’s not really the point of retro-computing. People do it for fun, not to win any benchmarks. To be fair, not everyone has an interest in old tech, but to each their own, I say! I have a soft spot for old NASA tech and analog telephone exchange equipment. Is it ground-breaking today? Not at all, but I still find it impressive what they did with that they had.
I totally get that.
It’ s like with everything, some people like the “classics” like cars.
At least something like a classic RISC workstation have some “soul” to them, due to the obscurity and arcane incantations they need. Although I have started to notice people doing the whole retro-gaming with old Pentium PCs… and that’s what I don’t understand. But to each their own.
The 5-speed ’87 325 sedan I had was a much better representation of a car then modern cars are. Was it as capable or comfortable as modern cars, no, but it was a lot more fun to drive. 😀
For my money, the small form factor x86 Xeon boxes (NUCs, Dell Precision SFF) are the best modern interpretation of a workstation. Install a Unix-like OS, and you’re ready to go!
@javiercero1
When I did high performance graphics development I kept an old Cyrix P200 then later an AMD K6 to use as a sanity check. It helped keep my focus on backwards compatibility and performance. I don’t think anyone bothers with this or scalability anymore. The general design issues plus aesthetics versus graphics grunt and the content production pipeline are a bit of an involved discussion. For brevity I’ll just limit myself to saying I don’t agree with a lot of the choices typically made today. You get equivalent discussions in the movie industry on practicals versus CGI. It’s fascinating comparing Bladerunner production to The Mandalorian’s production. There’s some youtubes covering this worth watching.
Homing in on one element compare the original Tomb raider to the the latest Call of Duty. The thing to examine is the rendering of ornamental carvings on walls in Tomb Raider and the pattern of detail in Call of Duty. At a psychological level and visual processing level Tomb Raider is less busy so causes less of a cognitive load. There is a lot of other stuff at play here too which makes analysis a bit none linear but the simple point is there is less overload. An equivalent might be a flight cockpit versus a busy restaurant.
If you take a wider view of scenes you will note that scenes can be quite busy. A technical detail nobody notices is not only the visual load but processing load. Nobody has yet got 3D perspective correct mipmaps. IBM did some work on this but gave up.
Okay, so modern hardware can blat an awful lot more at the screen but then what?
@Flatland_Spider
This was exactly Colin Chapman’s design principles behind the Lotus Esprit.
@HollyB
Also, the idea behind the Mazda MX-5 Miata, which is a blast to drive.
“Simplify, then add lightness” — Colin Chapman
I keep that in mind when designing things.
@Flatland_Spider
That’s a useful reminder. When people start shaving fractions of millimeters off tungsten washers you know they are serious. In the other direction Rolls Royce made their cars so quiet they had to remove insulation to add noise back in so drivers didn’t get sensory deprivation.
I don’t expect most of you have a use for this but I find there is some crossover between good design principles and games with make up. I was always into programming more for the pretty pictures than business stuff so it’s a good post coding outlet. I’ve also learned a lot by looking into haute coutre even if it’s just the realisation there is a lot more going on under the hood than you might suppose. On reflection I think this is one of the things you can gain by looking at retro systems. The shift in perspective throws up questions and gives you a chance to re-examine how everything works and why. The lessons learned here can be used to inform decisions in the present. On another level it’s the same with studying animals and insects for design solutions to engineering problems or different brain structures for insights into creating new computational methods.
@HollyB
I like how Rolls list the horsepower of their engine as “adequate”. 😀
Making the something complex seem simple without losing any power is hard.
Looking at constrained systems is eye opening. Anyone can be a genius when the envelope is large, but those who really know their craft can do wonders in a small envelope. 32 cores 1TB of RAM can make anyone look good, but can they do the same thing with a resource constrained system?
I know there is a lot more that goes into it, but giving people limits really allows magical things to happen. Also, not so magical things to happen, but finding the magic is the point.
I was thinking in the other direction. Get an Intel device with a decent GPU and use that as a terminal to a SPARC machine over xdmcp. This is how those Sun devices were intended to be used – it’s still an authentic experience running 100% Solaris software without needing to be limited to VGA, or sitting right next to a very noisy device. The University I went to operated this way using Wyse type terminals to Sun servers, but these days a NUC is more powerful/practical/cheaper.
malxau,
That’s a great point, you can still get the authentic experience with a thin client.
Clearly computers have improved by several orders of magnitude. “Retro” is for the experience over practicalities.
Alfman,
> Clearly computers have improved by several orders of magnitude. “Retro” is for the experience over practicalities.
I don’t know about you, but my “retro” experience is often openly tainted by using much newer hardware than somebody who actually used the environment had. Without speaking for him, I think Thom is already well down this path in proposing using a 2010-era server to act as a SPARC workstation, but SPARC workstations were being phased out by thin clients in the late 90s. There’s nothing about this that is authentically retro, and it doesn’t seem to be driven by nostalgia.
There is something fun about seeing an environment in its best light, even when you know that’s not how people really experienced it.
I think Thom is probably just bored and the quarantine is getting to him.
I can totally relate, I just build a OpenVMS cluster with a bunch of emulated VAX instances because I ran out of books to read and projects to finish this weekend, ha ha.
I’m guessing like a lot of us we were there when this retro stuff was new. It was an experience.
As a total change I’m a bit into retro clothes either as design inspiration or to wear. I have a 1980 satin blouse with shoulder pads (lol) which is still good for an evening out. Retro clothing and making is pretty big on Youtube. Bernadette Banner is the got-to for this topic. Retro make up is a thing too. English Heritage and Charlotte Tilbury have a few and there’s more if you’re interested in specific periods.
Authentically retro, yes.
I run Linux everyday for a perfectly retro *nix workstation experience.
Authentically vintage, no.
No one running a original *nix workstation had access to the hardware or processing power we have now, and that doesn’t really bother me.
I fired up DosBox a few years ago after some nostalgia got the better of me, and it lasted like 30 seconds. XD Modern *nix OSes are much better, yet a very similar experience.
Vintage computing is for the birds! I’ll get my retro computing fix with an RPi, OpenBSD on lowend x86 hardware, or maybe something like Gentoo, Slackware, or Arch. XD
You could simulate this today though with qemu-system-sparc booting up Solaris (I know SunOS 4.4.1 and Solaris 2.6, 7, 8, and 9 all work in 32-bit versions). A few years ago the QEMU project was able to figure out the lingering issues that prevented Solaris from working, and I put together a system for a client that was still using (32-bit only luckily) code for their backend systems on Solaris 8, and to this today they are STILL running (and compiling) this critical system on Solaris 8, now through QEMU. 🙂
This is something .. I happen to know quite a bit about, at least in the past. Albeit, from working on a Blade 2000 and Ultra 60.
Modern x86 graphics cards have trouble in Sparc servers because those cards have an initialization that is required to run, and that initialization runs as x86. So you won’t be able to do that on sparc, at least natively.
At one point in the past, there was a project that was attempting the initialization of PCI/PCIE cards on non-x86 architectures being worked on in the Linux kernel, where the initialization was run in an x86 virtual machine. I don’t know if that project ever came to fruition.
The cards that work with Sparc systems also are generally initialized by the OBP. I believe I had a Matrox card working in one once, where there was no initialization at all. There was some Internet tomfoolery stating that if you could get ahold of an older OBP Apple graphics card that they would work, but the two I tried were never recognized by the OBP nor made available to Linux once the machine booted.
The cards that will work right away will be cards made for Sun Sparc systems, that are recognized by the OBP. There were a couple ATI cards, the Sunffb cards, and then the rest of the Sun cards I don’t recall because they never had drivers in Xorg. I doubt any of them work with KMS today, and I would wonder if they worked at all in an updated operating system.
I think your best shot at working now would be one of the BSDs instead of Linux. Or an old copy of Solaris. Oh, yeah, and there are a couple Illumos-based distributions that were fairly complete on Sparc somewhat recently.
It boils down to: what types of interfaces are available in that server, and what form factors the cards need to be. I think your best shot is with the Sun sunffb series or one of the Sun ATI cards.
From https://www.openbsd.org/sparc64.html :
Sun XVR-100 and XVR-300 (radeonfb)
Sun Expert3D, Expert3D-Lite, XVR-500, XVR-600 and XVR-1200 (ifb)
Creator/Creator 3D/Elite 3D (creator)
Also:
NetBSD: http://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/sparc64/
FreeBSD: https://www.freebsd.org/platforms/sparc.html
Illumos-based:
http://www.tribblix.org/
Also, I think there was another Illumos-based distribution that came about, last I knew unsupported, that managed to bring in all of the graphics stack from Solaris. It supported every Sun graphics card that ever worked in them, including 3d acceleration. I’m not finding it right immediately. (It’s also been a _long_ time.)
Solaris 10 only really supports the GPUs that Sun shipped with their workstations, Solaris 11 is basically solely intended as a server OS and doesn’t really support anything. The various open source Solaris forks don’t seem to support video on Sparc if they support Sparc at all.
On Linux (maybe BSD too?) you may be in more luck, if you can physically connect an AMD card then Linux may be able to initialise it post-boot, but you won’t be able to interact with the firmware – the card will only become active after Linux has booted. This is probably not something many people have tried, especially on sparc… I believe some people are doing this on ARM or PPC where the same caveats would apply (the cards bios is intended for x86, so the card has to be initialised by linux).
There won’t be any binary drivers for sparc, you will have to use a card supported by the open source drivers.
This is actually a great question, among a couple dozen other SPARC based systems, I have a T4 myself at $HOME. Workstations make for a great desktop experience, and IMHO, none are more friendly than Solaris. I had asked this very question regarding using a T4 as a workstation to a Solaris developer @ Oracle, maybe 1.5 years ago roughly, not sure if there have been any updates in the SPARC frame buffer arena since that time. Either way, this was his reply.
=================================================================
The only frame buffer I’m aware of that’s offered for the SPARC T-series is the
https://www.eizorugged.com/products/sun_graphics/gfx_550e/
and it does support Solaris 11.3, but last I heard, does not support Solaris 11.4. (We upgraded the Xorg server in 11.4, and Xorg doesn’t have a stable driver ABI, so all drivers have to be updated as well – and the GNOME 3 desktop in Solaris 11.4 requires support for the Composite extension that older drivers didn’t have to support.)
Solaris 11.4 doesn’t include drivers for any of the old Sun SPARC graphics cards, even if you found one on Ebay – the only SPARC graphics drivers included are for the graphics devices in the ILOMs.
There are two approaches to this: a Sun Microsystems card Solaris compatible card and a PowerPC card. I have compiled a list of all the Sun Microsystems cards based on publicly available datasheets and the only PCI-E ones are:
* the XVR-4500 (I haven’t found any actually existing card, it might be an unicorn)
* the XVR-2500 (3dLabs Wildcat Realizm with 416MB RAM)
* the XVR-300 (ATi FireMV 128MB)
* the XVR-200 (Matrox G550 LP 32MB)
You won’t get anywhere with them.
If you want actual performance (but on Linux instead of Solaris since you don’t have Solaris drivers available), the fastest F-Code firmware NVidia PCI-E card was the mac Quadro FX 4500, which is usually found in the Quad-Core PowerMac G5.
The following contemporary cards might work also since they are PCI-e and the *MIGHT* have an F-Code ROM for the IBM Power8 servers, but they don’t have ANY video outputs (DVI/DP/HDMI/VGA/etc.):
* NVIDIA Tesla K80 24 GB (EKAJ / 00E4949 / AOC-KIT-NVK80-IB001)
* NVIDIA Tesla P100 16 GB (EKAZ / 01EM072 / AOC-KIT-NVTP100-IB001)
Anyway, you have a list of cards that were officially supported here: https://postimg.cc/jwN3RRJX
The Tesla cards might have an F-Code ROM, but it’s not guaranteed. If you want a sure hit, go for the Quadro FX 4500 PCI-E for Mac. That one has an F-Code ROM. Also note that Solaris 11 won’t be able to do anything with it except (at best) a plain dumb framebuffer. The OBP firmware might favor the iLOM VGA card and because Solaris has no drivers for it.
To switch to the new card you need to play with OBP a bit and it’s going to be hit and miss for a while. Obviously you need to “set-env output-device = screen”, and also have to redefine screen to the new card instead of the old one by removing the device alias from the nvramrc for screen and installing a new one with devalias. That means that you also have to identify the new one using a little device tree browsing, but it’s fun for the first 2 hours.
Initially the OpenFirmware environment will seem unnatural, but after a few tries it will grow on you. Start by reading “OpenBoot 3.x Command Reference Manual”.
And make sure that you don’t leave the diag and verbosity to max unless you want this to take forever. The last commands that you need to be aware of are: probe-all and probe-scsi-all.
I’ve tried this before, but I’ve never found the old Mac-compatible cards to work on UltraSparc systems, even when the card is somewhat older than the OpenBOOT firmware. The systems just refuse to boot.
The XVR100 is a Mac Radeon 7000. Same board, same firmware. When I have some time, I’ll try the Quadro FX 4500 in an Ultra 25 to see what happens.
It won’t work out of the box unless you also modify the devalias for screen in the nvramrc. from the previous card to the new one.
Incorrect. It is the same board and the Sapphire Radeon 7000 works equally well but you will have to flash the card with the Sun firmware or you won’t get a picture. Flashing to Mac might require a BIOS chip change as the Mac BIOS is twice the size of the PC/Sun BIOS.
Nvidia used to have Solaris drivers, though I can’t remember if they were SPARC / x86. Now it seems they only have BSD and Linux ones.
X86 only.
Possible to skip the video BIOS entirely?
For software that does not call out to the video bios, does it even matter that the card has a compatible bios? I realize that many standard bootloader/OS implementations are reliant on the video bios for output, but I’m not completely sure what happens when it’s missing. I have a feeling that as long as the system initializes the card’s plug and play configuration, then the video card should still be accessible even if it’s not totally initialized. It should be possible to initialize it in software after the fact.
In DOS you could program the VGA registers directly without calling the BIOS and it worked well enough. Some software did this to enter video modes that were otherwise not accessible. These modes were not well documented, but all in all it was relatively easy to do once you understand what’s going on in hardware. I’m pretty sure I’d be able to get it working on x86 without BIOS support. I could write the bios myself if I had to, but unfortunately on a SPARC machine running Solaris, I would be out of my element, I can’t even find a good bios reference for it 🙁
Most UltraSparc systems won’t boot if any of the PCI/PCI-X cards aren’t compatible with the loaded OpenBOOT firmware drivers.
You can screw with the any PCI/PCI-X card directly from the OpenBOOT prompt, as you could in DOS (but in the FORTH language), but you will need to write at least a basic driver to tell the firmware the card is OK to use and for what.
Also, since OpenBOOT is the basis of Apple’s Open Firmware (basically unmodified), I have tried using old graphics cards with the special Mac-compatible ROMs before in UltraSparc machines, and it didn’t work. Maybe someone else could make it happen, but it will take more than just plugging it in or basic configuration of OpenBOOT.
FlyingJester,
Are you certain it wouldn’t boot? Or would it boot and simply not support the card? It just seems odd that it would be designed not to boot at all due to an unrecognized card.
Can you point me to any documentation about what you are describing?
Yes, I understand and accept that “it didn’t work”, but my question is more subtle. I want to distinguish between “not work=not able to boot” versus “not work=boot with no driver support”. Keep in mind the machine Thom is talking about doesn’t normally need a graphics card to boot.
You’d undoubtedly need drivers for it to work, but my point is that you wouldn’t necessarily need a compatible BIOS. It’s possible that the drivers in linux could work, for example, as long as it’s able to get through the boot and identify the card.
I’d be curious if anyone here would be able to test this on a sparc machine:
1. Add an unsupported PCI card (to a working system).
2. Check whether it can boot at all regardless of the card being unsupported.
3. Check result of scanpci on solaris or lspci on linux to see if the card is present despite no support.
If this works, there’s a very good chance you could get the cards working in the OS without messing at all with the BIOS.
Probably not a novice project though…
I have a Sun Ultra 5. I had to flash a Radeon 7000 to get improved graphics. Just sticking a Mac/PC flashed card in will not work with Solaris at least. If you google ATI 7000 to XVR-100 you should bring up a couple of pages with all you need to do this.
The BIOS floating around on the web is for 32MB cards. It will work on 64MB Sapphire cards but you will be limited to 1600×1050-ish. This resolution from the Ultra 5 does not scale well on my 1920×1200 Dell monitor for some reason and the image is offset somewhat.
There is a 64MB BIOS around somewhere but I have not been able to get hold of it.
SDug,
Yes, I’m not surprised you can flash firmware to make a device compatible, your information might be helpful to Thom. However the reason I asked the specific questions I did was because I wanted to know the exact nature of the failure mode. If the operating system is able to boot without graphics despite the incompatible BIOS firmware, then it represents a completely different failure mode than not being able to get past the BIOS at all. If the BIOS firmware doesn’t block the system from booting successfully, then it would mean one could conceivably solve it with OS drivers alone even if firmware isn’t available for SPARC. Of course it may take some specialized hardware & driver skills to get there.
When I say “wouldn’t boot” I mean that although the ALOM port activated, but when I hit the power button nothing changed and the ALOM didn’t think the computer was on. I mostly serial into these machines, and with unsupported PCI cards it won’t boot any OS. It doesn’t work at an OpenBOOT level. You would need to write not an OS driver, but an OpenBOOT driver for it (that’s what is in the ROM on the card).
FlyingJester,
I’m not having much luck finding technical details about the SPARC bootup sequence. There’s such an abundance of detailed information when it comes to x86…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Option_ROM
etherboot.sourceforge.net/doc/html/devman/extension.html
…but all the information I’m finding online for SPARC is so high level and terse on details that it’s very difficult to learn exactly how it’s supposed to work under the hood.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware
I found references to this book, which might provide the low level information…
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9780130224965
Bah, without better documentation it would be very difficult to really debug it.
Hmmm, I have an idea of a T-1000 or T-2100
Exactly
I have used a SunFire 240 as a workstation before, and they are pretty cheap (around $200 at most). They have dual socket UltraSparc III CPUs, and can support something like 16 GB of RAM.
I found Linux is just a huge dumpster fire for UltraSparc. OpenBSD worked WAY better, and “just works” with the old ATI RAGE64 chipset GPUs these often come with (the XVR series GPUs are exactly this).
I’m being pedantic but I wouldn’t call the ATI Rage series a GPU. Nvidias marketing was somewhat optimistic too. I’m somewhat doubtful the Nvidia GeForce 256 deserves being called a GPU. GPUs didn’t really become a thing until shaders took off and matured. Few people will remember but cards of this era could actually be slower processing graphics than the CPU in some use cases. For early games a lot of T&L code (and texture matrix code) was done on the CPU and the graphics card was a glorified framebuffer.
ATI traditionally produced the better quality drivers. Nvidia drivers have and still have a tendency to allow none conformant OpenGL calls and cheat by sacrificing quality for speed. (It looks good in motion but you’d be fired if you relied on it for image display on medical diagnostic hardware.) Quite a few “bugs” and performance issues with ATI cards were actually down to developers only developing and testing on Nvidia hardware prior to release. It was always good practice back then to sanity check graphics code against a variety of graphics cards and drivers, and compilers. Often running the code on different hardware and compilers showed up none conformant code or bugs in implementations which might otherwise have been missed.
Reading through wiki the Rage II was supported on the Mac G3.
Yeah, but if you plug in one of the ATI Rage64 cards, it has video. Most cards don’t work in these machines.
In fact, if you use OpenBSD (which is really the best choice, Linux is a disaster on UltraSparc), then it does use the CPU for graphics via Mesa and just uses the video card as a framebuffer. It’s not terrible, I’ve played DOSBox and some DOOM sourceports on these machines before and it’s generally good enough.
Who comes here to be the adult in the room? I come here to be with the other crazies. 😀
We’ve had our differences on takes on politics, but that’s about it really. Fly the flag!
You might have better luck using OpenBSD or a Linux distro as the OS then Solaris.
OpenBSD SPARC64: https://www.openbsd.org/sparc64.html
Linux SPARC T1/T2 Support: https://www.oracle.com/servers/technologies/opensparc-operating-systems.html
Too bad I didn’t see this some time back. I had an Sun Ultra 2 Enterprise. Got tired of it sitting around my office for a long time. It did work but it wasn’t the speediest. I even upgraded it much as I could with the meager budget I had at the time.
1. Upgraded the RAM from 128 Meg to 384 Meg
2. Added a second CPU (ended up dual UltraSparc II’s IIRC)
3. Added an Ultra Creator 3D (UPA instead of SBUS?) video card instead of the hilariously underpowered CG6.
4. Replaced the dead NVRAM chip so I would not get errors whenever I powered up
I couldn’t give the thing away, except to a computer recycler!
I’ve previously run Solaris on X86 hardware. There is a closed source NVIDIA driver and it supports all the regular GeForce Cards. NVIDIA has support for all their GPUS upto/including RTX 20 series on Solaris X86/X64. I’ve also got an SGI O2 workstation. This sounds like it’d be a fun project.
Running on AMD64 hardware like that seems much much nicer! I have an Ultra 5 and its noise is already something compared to what I’m used to nowadays.
I have seen colleagues use Sun keyboards that had a USB connector, apparently newer models had that.
Take a nice quiet AMD64 box, install the best NVIDIA card that the available drivers for Solaris AMD64 support, obtain a USB Sun keyboard. That will give you something way more impressive than anything SPARC nowadays. It will do most of the same stuff, but it will be more pleasant in many ways.
In a way I respect this site is trying to cater to an audience, but I would say the big audience of interested people will not be here. Having been less than ten years in the Dutch IT sector, I know where systems like SPARC and Alpha/Itanium (OpenVMS) are used in production systems. The people that love keeping these systems up and running end up in those organizations too. This is just the tiny Netherlands and I am sure that you will find similar situations in many other countries.
But before I worked in Dutch IT, I was not aware of this. I don’t know if Thom has more outlets than just this site for these kinds of interests.
Why aren’t there any European retro workstations worth playing with or didn’t Europe get past just producing dodgy Soviet knock-offs? There was the RiscPC but was there anything else? France? Germany? Anyone?
Amiga? Seriously though, with Amiga Unix and video editing. The amiga is a pretty awesome hardware /software integrated workstation.
Western Europe had quite a few white box assemblers but none I can think of offhand who didn’t use x86 processors. There was, however, a niche UK company called Tadpole, which produced Sparc and Alpha laptops but you will pay through the nose for any of those if you can get your hands on one.
Otherwise you have the early runners like Sinclair and Amstrad but I wouldn’t call any of those Workstations.
I remembering hearing about a Swedish company which produced their own workstations, but I don’t remember and can’t find them.
I don’t think there was. I want to say Western Europe was on the tail end of recovering economically from WW2 in the 80s, so they relied on the US for chips. It’s kind of hard to justify investing in fabs and procs when people are starving. Meanwhile, the Eastern Bloc couldn’t rely on the US, and developed their own.
It’s interesting to think about what would happen if some country embraced a hard copyleft take on technology. They produced open chips built on open standards with older fab tech paired with a open OS. Kind of like a bizarro Apple or an extreme left Intel or AMD. It’s an interesting thought exercise, ignoring all the capitalist countries (US, Western Europe, China) which would bomb the country out of existence or finance a coup in the name of Freedom(TM).
I have had the same idea and got a T-5220 a few years ago, which I could use as a server with VNC or with a GPU. Sadly I haven’t had the time to work on this project yet. I might get a T4-1 in the future, but first I want to see if I can get Linux, OpenBSD and Illumos working with this hardware. Otherwise I still have an Ultra 10 and an Enterprise 250, which I would most likely install OpenBSD on due to the limited hardware specifications.