Solbourne Software Compatability
Purchasing OS Media/Licenses
Please see OS/MP Ordering Information section.
Operating Systems
Solbournes use a SunOS derived Operating System called
OS/MP (probably for Operating
System/Multi-Processing). Because Solbourne derived the OS from
SunOS, they had to wait for Sun to do an OS upgrade before a new version
of OS/MP could be built. There was thus a noticable delay between a new
SunOS release and the corresponding OS/MP release. In addition, many
Patches had to be generated by Sun, and tested and applied against OS/MP
for compatability.
The most current releases for the OS/MP operating system are as follows:
| OS/MP release | SunOS compatability | Solbourne H/W Support |
| 4.1 | 4.1 | Series4, Series5/5E |
| 4.1A | 4.1.1 | Series4, Series5/5E, Series6, KAP |
| 4.1B | 4.1.2 | Series5/5E, Series6, KAP |
| 4.1C | 4.1.3 / 4.1.3_U1 | Series5/5E, Series6, KAP |
Some Major OS differences
A partial list includes:
- Multi-Processor Support
- Obviously the big one. Solbourne did a good job of making a very
efficient MP kernel out of SunOS. It hasn't really been until
Solaris2.4 on Suns SPARCcenter boxes that Sun could offer close to
what Solbourne was doing with KBus and OS/MP.
- VDDRV kernel loadable modules
- Unfortunately, Solbourne didn't include support for the kernel
loadable modules (options VDDRV). This can cause pain and suffering
if you have SBus vendors who only supply modload-able drivers.
However : - It is generally possible to hack a modload .o driver
into the _cdevsw[] table in conf.c, but it may take some doing,
possible disassembly, etc. Hopefully your vendor will assist you
with this
- dump
- Purdue live filesystem enhancements, /etc/media has a table for
density, blocking factor, and device length.
- SCSI
-
- Added Diagnostics features
- many devices were given 'stat' facilities. Check in /usr/etc/*stat
to find some. These provided useful information on SCSI, Ethernet
terminal MUX, etc statistics that are quite valuable for problem
troubleshooting.
- IPI disk support
- The IPI drivers are hacked SMD drivers (using the same device spec of
'xd'). You can't intermix IPI and SMD on the same system (or so they say).
But what about Solaris2?
Well.... the best answer is "don't even think about it". The factual
answer is that indeed there was some work going on at Solbourne to support
Solaris2.x on the Series5/5E and Series6 systems. However, the best this
ever got to be was an "unreliable/unstable" beta release.
Update: consider any work on Solaris2.x for Solbourne pretty dead. I can't
see any possible benefit to it, and the R&D wouldn't come close to the
payback. MEI supposedly finished an S4000 port of Solaris 2.x, but it is
not available as a product. The Series5/6 Solaris releases were
on the Sun Solaris 2.3 distribution. look at various file sets there.
What about Other Operating Systems?
Issues
There's some issues that need to be addressed.
- KBus
- Obviously, this is ground-level work.
- KAP Processor
- The IDT's KAP processor is a derivative processor that has a lot
of Mask Level bug workarounds in OS/MP.
Linux
No Support that i know of. You can obtain more information from
the S/Linux FAQ
OpenBSD
No Support that i know of. You can obtain more information from
the OpenBSD SPARC support list
The OpenBSD changes
page lists KBus work as being added, but i see nothing else.
OpenBSD 2.2 released (Dec 4, 1997)
Addition of 'kbus' port for the Solbourne Series5 sparc-based machines.
[There is now a basic OpenBSD/Solbourne
port from good old Miod. -- Cameron]
Libraries
In general most libraries you are interested in are compatable
across like OS/MP and SunOS revisions.
libc may simply be replaced with one built on a SunOS machine. This
piece of the OS is entirely identical to SunOS. So you can happily
build a libc with DNS support, etc and just copy it over. The inverse
is also true, that you can build a libc on your OS/MP box and copy it to
your Suns. The only caveat being that you should stay within the minor
revision levels for compatability. E.G. OS/MP 4.1C corresponds to SunOS
4.1.3.
last modified on Wed Jul 4 20:19:10 MDT 2001
Stephen Dowdy