6.1 current instabilty on Sun Ultra 40's

[stan]

On Thu, Aug 31, 2006 at 01:39:35PM +1000, Norberto Meijome wrote:
> On Wed, 30 Aug 2006 18:02:28 -0400
> stan <stanb at panix.com> wrote:
> 
> > I can't get  6.1 to even compile a new kernel on 2 different Sun
> > Ultra 40's Anyone have nay reason that it should not work on these machines?
> 
> Stan,
> as a general rule, telling the list what you did and the (exact) error /
> problems you encountered will give better results...
> 
> Sorry I can't be of help in this particular issue.
> 
That would be a little hard to summarize, as it's taken a couple
of months to come to the conclusion that FreeBSD is unusable
on these machines. Partly because I only have 2 of them, one of which
is in daily critical production running Linux. 

I had assumed that I might have hardware problems on the machine
I'm trying to use for FreeBSD, despite having run _extensive_
hardware diagnostics. Yesterday, in desperation< I shut down the machine
running Linux, and put the boot disk from the other machine in it.
On that disk is a world, built from last weekends cvsup. I was able
to reproduce it's instability to build a generic kernel. It fails with
a signal (I believe) 11, Basically I was flagging others who may be considering
buying this hardware, with the intent of running FreeBSD on it to not 
do so. Without having machines to give to developers, I don't really
expect this  situation to get corrected in the foreseeable future.

Having said that, at this point I have a machine that I really can't use
for the application it was purchased for. I'd be willing to do any testing
the developers might be interested in doing on this machine.

-- 
Unix is very simple, but it takes a genius to understand the simplicity.
(Dennis Ritchie)