SS20 Desktop: Basic Web Browsing

Last time I looked at the relative performance of the CPU modules I have on hand, the HyperSPARC running at 90Mhz seemed to be the best option for using the machine in a workstation role. Today we begin to test this out by trying to browse the web. This sounds simple, but it’s actually quite challenging to do for a vintage machine as web browsers tend to require lots of graphics processing and there are very limited options available.

I have managed to get three basic web browsers compiled and working, Lynx, Links and Dillo. I’ve tried building others that are light weight with little success, more main-stream browsers such as firefox are simply too demanding to even try. Three potential candidates for future build attempts are ELinks, Midori and Netsurf.

The first program, lynx is one of the older programs, started in 1992 by students and staff at the University of Kansas it is still updated today. It runs from a terminal and has no graphical capability, because of this it is quite useful for vision impaired users as it works well with screen readers. You would be forgiven for thinking that lacking graphical display is a hindrance on the modern web, but lynx manages to make most pages quite readable. Well behaved/designed websites generally work quite well with some compromises on formatting, I tried google searches, reading on wikipedia and several wordpress blogs which all worked quite well. I was even able to use it to read my email via gmail. Unfortunately there are also plenty of sites that aren’t friendly to lynx (such as ebay), and page formatting isn’t always nice to read. These issues stem mostly from sites that haven’t crossed over to HTML 5, or ones that over use complex formatting. It performs quite well on the Sparc Station.

Links whilst having a similar name is a completely separate project to lynx. It offers the capability to run in a text-only terminal in much the same way as lynx, but can also be used graphically via X, SVGALib, or a frame buffer directly. This makes it quite useful on machines that don’t have a working X server. Much like lynx, well behaved websites are very usable and generally work quite well, again with some formatting compromises. It handles page formatting roughly as well as lynx does, but with the addition of images. This makes some websites like ebay more usable, although the formatting is still wonky at times. I’ve had gmail working on it in the past, but not today due to the current build or changes to gmail.

Dithering example

Performance on the sparc is pretty good, with short delays when images are being displayed for the first time. This happens because my sparc has an 8-bit display and Links will convert images using dithering and colour approximation. To maximise the number of colours it can use Links uses something called a private colour map. This is why other windows have their colours messed up whilst Links is in focus and vice versa. This sounds like it would result in poor image quality, however links manages this conversion quite well. The loading delay would certainly be shorter on 24 bit displays.

Dillo is a light-weight browser with a GUI that looks much more familiar for most users. It requires much more computing power compared to the others, but as a result it tends to display web pages with formatting closer to what you’d expect from the page. I found that many pages worked quite well, but others failed to display anything at all. It seemed to be an issue with SSL, I have the root certificates installed, but it still believed all connections had invalid certificates when clearly they didn’t. However you can see from the screen shot, that sites like wikipedia render exceptionally well.

Performance on the SparcStation unfortunately is quite slow, mostly whilst loading a page. Dillo can consume so much CPU as to even starve the X server of cycles, making it appear the system has frozen (when it hasn’t). From what I’ve read this could be because Dillo is multi-threaded, and is probably starting a number of threads upon loading a page. It may run significantly better on systems with more than one CPU, in my case switching to using the SuperSparc modules would possibly solve this.

Browsing the web on such an old machine was never going to be easy, some things just aren’t feasible such as javascript and video content. However it actually works reasonably well for reading static web pages and doing basic interaction such as posting a comment. Of the three browsers I’ve tried so far I think Links is probably the most usable, it provides images and formats pages reasonably well without consuming too many CPU cycles. Lynx comes second only because it doesn’t show images, it is a good option for text only browsing. Finally Dillo is probably just a smidge too demanding for my particular hardware and fails ungracefully with some sites, although it does provide the prettiest render you also have to wait the longest.

SS20 Desktop: Renewed Vigour

Last time I had started to finally get to grips with the system hanging issues, having found out much of the problem came down to the SMP kernel issues related to the on-board SCSI that are still prevalent within NetBSD releases. I was fortunate that I’d been given a chance to try out a patch that made SMP much more stable (although not perfect). This gave me essentially 4 different configuration options. After thinking about it, I decided it would probably be prudent to make some measurements to hopefully determine what the best way to go is.

I have three Mbus modules (pictured above), a dual CPU SuperSparc @ 50Mhz, a single CPU SuperSparc @60Mhz and a single CPU HyperSparc @ 90Mhz. The clock speeds can be a little misleading as there is a little more to each module. The SuperSparc modules each come with 1Mb per CPU of cache where as the HyperSparc has only 256Kb, and the dual CPU module runs on a slower Mbus @40Mhz whilst the other two run at 50Mhz. Additionally the rough guide to Mbus modules, an essential site for anyone with a sun machine like mine, suggested that the SuperSparc CPUs would actually perform better on a per clock basis. Given all this it’s not really clear which the best performers will be. From here on in I’ll abreviate SuperSparc to SS and HyperSparc to HS

Today we’re going to look at the results of some of the intensive benchmarks I’ve put the modules through, and at the end the best choice of configuration given the hardware I have on hand. All the tests are run with the same OS (NetBSD 7.1) and hardware with the exception of the Mbus modules under test.

The first set of benchmarks are aimed at measuring basic CPU speed. The benchmarks I’ve used are Dhrystone (version 2.1), Whetstone and both the double and single precision versions of the linpack benchmark. These tests are measuring single threaded performance of the modules.

Just looking at these charts it’s obvious that the HS is the fastest of the three modules. Given its higher clock speed that is to be expected, but it also attained higher scores per clock for all the tests except whetstone. The linpack tests show a large difference with the HS running about 12% faster per clock for double precision and about 22% faster per clock for the single. The Dhrystone test showed a much more subdued advantage, only running about 7% faster per clock. The Whetstone test showed the HS was slower, doing floating point arithmetic by about 11% slower per clock cycle.

Both SS modules performed about the same relative to their clock rate, which indicates the Mbus speed wasn’t a large factor in these tests, and that the data size was likely smaller than that of the L2 cache (1Mb). I would have expected the dual 50Mhz module to be slower in single threaded tasks as the Mbus is slowed to 40Mhz (as opposed to 50Mhz the others use).

I’m not sure how I feel about the results here, the data set size for the tests was almost certainly too small to even exceed the capacity of the HSs 256Kb cache. I’m not sure what to make of the linpack results, but the dhrystone and whetstone results seem to indicate the HS core is better at integer and string operations and the SS core is better at floating point.

I selected the next benchmark because it offered speed measurements over a range of data sizes. The Sieve of Eratosthenes is a simple algorithm for finding prime numbers within a finite numerical space. Rather than explain it myself look here on Wikipedia for more details. One of it’s key features is that it is quite hard on a CPU’s memory bandwidth, and it’s use of the cache is quite sub-optimal. I omitted testing the 50Mhz SS module.

The results are quite interesting. The HS enjoys an advantage of about 14% per clock when the data set fits within it’s cache, but suffers quite a performance drop once the data set gets larger. Despite being 30Mhz slower the SS is faster for data sets small enough for its cache but too large to fit in the HSs cache. I suspect this gap would be widest at just below 1Mb data size, but the program didn’t allow control over that. The worst data point shows the HS as 44% slower per clock. This is quite surprising, as the SS is not much faster than the Mbus speed (only 10Mhz faster) I didn’t expect the advantage in that data size to be so large. After 1Mb data size is exceeded, the HS starts to catch up again, but the data points don’t get large enough to know if it ever achieves equal relative performance again. I’d imagine that once the data is large enough both modules would perform close to the same as memory bandwidth becomes the limiting factor.

The next benchmark is similar in that there is measurement over a range of data sizes, but the algorithm is significantly different. The algorithm used is heapsort, a relatively efficient sorting algorithm used in many places. You can find more details here on Wikipedia. One of it’s characteristics is that it is much more cache friendly. Again I omitted testing the dual 50Mhz SS.

Looking at the graphs this test really requires some points at larger data sizes. I can only really guess, but I’d imagine that the performance would eventually converge given that memory bandwidth would eventually become the dominant factor. The previous test indicates that there may even be a window in which the SS performs better, but without actual data we will never know.

Given that I’ll be using this machine as a desktop workstation I ran a benchmark known as x11perf. It simply tests the maximum speed of components of the X11 protocol. It’s often known just as X for short, and is basically the software that unix systems use to interface to video displays.The chart shows performance relative to the dual 50Mhz SS (the yellow line represents it). A 2 is twice and fast, and 0.5 is half as fast. Each point on the X axis is a test, like line drawing for instance, there are so many tests (over 300) it wasn’t practical to separate and chart them individually. Out of interest I ran the dual 50Mhz SS with a MP kernel to see if it made any appreciable difference.

There are some quite interesting features of this chart. Firstly you’ll notice that both the faster modules have tests that are significantly slower than the dual SS (30-35% slower at worst). This is because those tests are CPU bound, and with a dual CPU module both the X server and client can have a whole CPU to itself. Typically those tests involve little actual drawing to screen, like plotting points.

In general the dual 50Mhz SS is slower than the faster modules. The SS @ 60Mhz is about 1.15 times faster on average and the HS is 1.75 times faster on average. The HS is in general the best on the raw performance numbers, with some odd exceptions. Some tests seem to favour the SS @ 60Mhz, which would be down to cache size.

Relative to their clock speed, the 60Mhz SS does better than the HS, but I’d imagine this would be due to the SBus limiting the maximum through put to the frame buffer. The SBus only runs @ 25Mhz so is almost certainly going to slow down a faster CPU when drawing.

The last and final test is one called Ramspeed. It’s basically designed to measure the memory bandwidth. I opted for the more general integer and floating point tests over the specific reading and writing tests as they are more likely to represent a computational load. There are 4 tests, Copy creates two buffers and copies data from one to the other, Scale creates two buffers and copies data from one to the other, but scales the number by some constant, finally Triad creates 3 buffers and adds two of them together (scaling one by a constant factor) and storing the result in the third buffer. All buffers are the same size. The tests I’ve chosen only test with buffers that are 32Mb in size, so much larger than the caches of either of the modules. You can select the buffer size and some tests available in the program test a range of sizes.

The results are pretty bad for the HS, it achieves slightly better speed only for the copy operations, which shouldn’t be surprising as the Mbus should be a limiting factor. However for the other tests the SS performs quite a bit better, so much in fact I ran the tests many times just to make sure. This would appear to be down to the memory and cache architecture of the modules, not just the cache size, although that is certainly playing an important role in the HS failing to perform. The HS does have significantly smaller L1 cache only having a 8k instruction cache versus a 20k Instruction and 16k data L1 cache in the SS core.

Having now spent a couple of weeks testing these modules I think we’re starting to get a picture of what these chips can do relative to each other. The HS is clearly faster as long as any data isn’t larger than its cache. The SS on the other hand isn’t as fast at it’s peak, largely due to a lower clock speed, but handles larger data sets significantly better. The X11 test showed that it is quite beneficial to have multiple CPUs in a workstation, even if only for basic X11 applications. However it also shows the HS being quite a good choice. I think the tests also show there was some merit to the idea that the SS modules performed better relative to their clock speed, but it also shows this is highly dependent on the work load.

So what am I going with and what would I recommend. With the hardware I have I’ll use the HS @ 90 for running the machine as a workstation as that makes it snappier to use in general. The flip side is that if I were to use the machine for a computational load, such as compiling a number of packages, number cruching, or a basic server the two SS modules would almost certainly perform much better as long as the job could be divided between the CPUs. Even the SS @ 60Mhz has a good chance of doing computation better on it’s own. The HS on it’s own is disadvantaged by not being able to multi-task as well, I have noticed that X is in general less responsive when the machine is under load (compared to both SS modules together), so a second HS module would probably be a nice addition in the future.

If money was no object and I could have any parts at all, both Ross and Sun had decent offerings. The fastest SS is 85-90Mhz, two of these would certainly be quite fast. However I’d imagine they probably wouldn’t be as fast as any pair of HS modules over 125Mhz. So in the end the HS modules would be the way to go if you had access to anything. As it stands, looking around online it’s actually really hard to find faster modules for a reasonable price. Among the SS modules those over 60Mhz are quite expensive and largely not available. The HS parts have a similar problem, but you can get 90Mhz – 133Mhz parts at fairly decent prices, although faster modules still command a high price, and slower modules wouldn’t be worth it. Again with what’s available the HS seems the way to go.

I’ve tried to be as thorough as possible, but if you want to see the raw data  and gnumeric spreadsheet with calculations and charts you can find them here.

SS20 Desktop: Some minor progress

Whilst it has been some time since the original post, I have been a busy beaver trying to get the old Sparcstation 20 running. I’ve been making an effort to get the hardware working with some mixed success, and have made much better progress with the software.

The hardware is of course the much more pressing matter for obvious reasons. I had a recurrence of the problem I had with stack under run errors and just general problems booting in general. Of course this lead me to suspect the hardware, so this week I went about trying to work out what exactly was causing the issue. One way to help determine which part is at fault is by stripping the system back to the minimal and gradually add components while testing the system in between. Having removed most components the stack under run symptom didn’t disappear, trying each memory stick individually didn’t improve things, so I began to fear the worst as surely not all the RAM I have is faulty. It was at this point I decided to run the set-defaults command to reset the computers configuration despite not seeing anything there that should cause any issues, this funnily enough seemed to do the trick, as far as getting the machine to the open boot prompt without any errors and passing all the diagnostic tests with everything installed. I had to scale back to a 17G fujitsu HDD as the larger one didn’t cooperate with the system.

At this point I breathed a big sigh of relief as my hardware is probably in working condition. It’s booting the OS (NetBSD 7.1) and seems to run fine with one problem. Random system hangs. There doesn’t seem to be any pattern such as when the machine is loaded down or network access. I’m guessing that the kernel is having some issue and tries to hand control back to the system ROM, but this some how hangs/fails. I might try running the machine with out the X server in case it is stopping any errors from being displayed. I looked into the kernel messages and noted a few devices that may also be the culprit. The kernel is detecting the on board graphics (comes up as sx0 in the messages) even though I do not have a VSIMM installed, as I’m using a SBUS graphic board instead. The audio chip in my machine is listed as a DBRI, which is known to have issues with the current kernel driver. If you try to play audio in any manner the system hangs, it’s been a bug for a while, it kinda worked under NetBSD 4.0 when I last had that running. With this in mind I’m building my own kernel with the drivers for these two devices and other unnecessary devices removed.

I’ve had much more luck getting software to build in my emulated machine. I’ve got a fairly large collection of software to try out. Although I did have trouble much earlier on when either QEMU or the emulated machine would hang during a build. I can’t be sure if that’s down to the emulation or if it’s a genuine issue with the OS, and a possible cause of my problems on the real machine. Whilst I haven’t really changed anything in the emulation, it hasn’t hung for quite a while, so it’s any bodies guess as to the cause when it did happen.

Progress has been slow, but I’m gradually getting there! I’ve seen some cheap Ross Hypersparc 90Mhz modules that I’m considering buying as an upgrade.

SparcStation Desktop project.

Unfortunately I’ve been neglecting my poor old Sun hardware, mostly because of time and space constraints. I thought I’d try to go some way to correcting this by actually beginning the process of setting up the SparcStation 20 as a vintage desktop work station. I’d been planning on doing this for ages, as long ago as when I built the replacement server machine.

Hardware wise I’ve not acquired anything new, although everything needed a test and some basic cleaning to get it working. I’m still having issues, but I’m unsure if it’s an hardware fault or a problem with the software I’m installing. We’ll get to the software in a moment, first we’ll look at the hardware installed.

At the moment I have 3 CPUs in the machine. They are all V8 Supersparcs with two 50Mhz chips on one module and a 60Mhz one on a module on it’s own. Each module has 1Mb of cache memory which doesn’t sound like much now, but was a large amount when these machines first appeared.

Frame Buffer

I’ve currently got about 304Mb of memory installed, I had more but unfortunately one of the sticks that was in it fails to detect anymore. I’d like to have a VSIMM as that would allow me to use the built in cg14 frame buffer (graphics card) which is probably the best performing one available for machines of it’s type. I managed to purchase a 2Mb TGX+ frame buffer and adapter to connect it to a VGA screen, which is doing an odd resolution of 1152×900 at 8 bits per pixel. It’s obviously not the fastest, but it does the job. I’ve selected an 136Gb 10K RPM SCA drive for the hard disk, certainly a bit of overkill, but it would just be sitting on my shelf otherwise.

The initial issue I had was stack under run errors after the boot screen came up and the machine attempted to boot. My first instinct was of course failed memory, which lead me to find the undetected memory module. But no matter which memory I ran I had the same problem. After some poking into the system environment (kinda like the BIOS settings in the PC but without the nice interface.) I found some items that were not at their defaults and changing them back seems to have fixed the stack under run.

Dual CPU MBUS module

Unfortunately that’s not the end of the issues, as after installing and running NetBSD for a while the machine will hang, reset or have a watchdog timer trigger. This certainly could be faulty RAM, but the power supply is also a potential suspect as is the operating system itself. I need to follow this up with some more testing, unfortunately I don’t have a spare PSU to test with.

Software wise I’m much more prepared and have had much more success. I’ve been using Qemu, which does full-system emulation for a number of old and different platforms, including Sparc systems. Qemu has been useful for building packages and the kernel specifically for my machine. Something I had done ages ago when I first intended to do the install.

At the time I built for NetBSD 6.1.4 which is the OS I’ve installed and tried out on the machine. It’s out of date by quite some margin now, so I’ve set up a new virtual machine to start work on getting 7.1 packages and kernel built. It has a bunch of improved hardware support, particularly in the frame buffer acceleration, so I’m keen to see how it goes. I’m still building packages I want for it, but I’m happy with 7.1 under qemu so far. I’m hoping the improved hardware support helps with the hang/watch dog/reset issues.

When it’s all done, I’ll post about what it’s like to use the machine for specific tasks, like say browsing the web and checking email.

Hardware pickups

Recently I’ve been able to pick up some interesting hardware and I thought I’d share some photos of it with you. It was also an opportunity to try out some better lighting in the hope of getting better pictures.

This unfortunately wasn’t the greatest photo due to the reflectivity of the packaging.

First up is a pair of 80387sx co-processors from the mid 80’s. Very few people actually bought and installed these chips as floating point arithmetic was mostly only used in scientific applications or Computer Aided Design. Consequently chips like these can be quite rare, and this pair clock in a 33Mhz making them some of the faster 387’s.

Intel weren’t the only company making co-processors for the 386, these included Cyrix, Chips and Technologies,  IIT, ULSI and Weitek. Most of these were faster than the Intel part, but had some compatibility issues, and some were of completely different designs.

Interestingly the NPU’s as they were known could be clocked asynchronously from the CPU. They also could operate whilst the CPU was busy doing something else, which gave machines with these some very crude parallel capabilities.

Mainboard overview

boot ROM and IDPROM chip

Cache chip and SBus socket

Processor and Framebuffer chip

Cat Artwork

Here we have a Sun Microsystems mainboard from a Sparcstation IPX. The machine came in a neat lunchbox form-factor that was actually impressively small. This particular board has a Weitek Sparc processor that ran about 40Mhz. These chips had an FPU on-die, so they would have been similar to the 486 in performance. The LSI chip and some of it’s supporting chips are likely the 1Mb of system cache which was quite large for the time. The Sun GX chip is a graphics controller which contained some basic drawing acceleration. These features made the IPX quite an impressive little workstation. Most of the chips and the board itself appear to be manufactured in 1993.

It’s a shame I don’t have the rest of the machine, I’d like to be able to run this little beast. I’m not even sure I can get RAM for it, or if what I have is compatible. I’ll have to keep an eye out for the chassis and other parts.

Mechanical Keyboard

This might look like an ordinary keyboard, but it is a proper mechanical switch keyboard that came with the next piece of hardware (a PC clone). Despite its very plain looks it feels fantastic to type on and has that distinctive mechanical sound. It has a larger DIN plug which actually suites many machines up to and included many Pentium based machines. It is a bit grubby but in otherwise good condition.

 

Chassis

Overview

CPU and system RAM

SCSI socket and VGA chip

Seagate HDD

Video RAM

Chipset and some IO support chips

Lastly we have an interesting PC clone. This one was made by a company called Microbyte, which turns out that they were an Australian company based in Adelaide who made PC clones such as this one. It is clear that they designed and built their own boards and wrote their own PC compatible BIOS. Quite an achievement for what must have been a small engineering company. I found very little information about them online unfortunately.

My machine is a PC230sx, which has a 386sx@20Mhz with a Trident VGA card. It has SIPP memory fitted for both the main memory and video memory. They installed an unusually large amount for the VGA, having a full 1Mb of video memory. The system RAM is 2Mb in total.

When I bought this machine I didn’t think it had a hard disk, but it turns out that it has a Seagate ST3144A which is 130Mb. Probably an impressive and expensive drive in it’s day. This drive still works, I just had to configure the CMOS with the drives details which are handily written all over the machine.

You may notice the socket for a WD33c93 chip, this was a SCSI controller chip. This would have to be one of the few older machines that have the capability of on-board SCSI. I’m not sure why the chip is missing here, but these machines were apparently commonly fitted with SCSI drives instead. Looking in the BIOS seems to indicate that they were supported for booting. I may have to find one of these chips and see if I can get SCSI to work.

Between the VGA chip and VLSI chips lays an extremely long header where the expansion riser card would normally be inserted. This machine doesn’t have the riser card, so I can’t plug in a sound card or anything else which is a bit of a shame. I’m surprised the machine works without it as I’ve seen many other machines which don’t work correctly or at all when it is missing.

This board has some stickers that look like they were written by a service technician, they are attached to a part of the board under the floppy drive where there is a blank area containing no visible traces or chips. The first sticker reports an invalid opcode at a particular memory address which could indicate a problem with RAM or software.

Fortunately after testing the machine I’ve found the only problem so far is the malfunctioning COM1, the rest of the machine appears to be functional, and the IDE hard drive boots DOS ok. I have noticed that the Floppy drive light stays on, something which sometimes indicated incorrect installation of the cable. In this case the cable is correct, and the drive even reads disks, so there is likely a jumper setting on the drive that needs correcting.

I benchmarked this machine with Topbench to see how it compares to others. It was marginally faster than a 286@16Mhz with a 287 co-processor. I think there may be a few factors that contribute to this. Firstly I think the RAM must be a similar speed to that in the 286, thus slowing down the memory and opcode tests. It does perform better in the 3d games test which I found interesting as that has some floating point arithmetic. Luckily this is perfect for testing my homebrew platform game.

Finally I’m pleased with how the extra lighting has improved the pictures, but my technique still needs work. Perhaps another source of lighting is called for, or perhaps finally a step up to a better camera.

3rd Aniversary and Work on the Sparcstation

This weekend marks the third year I’ve been writing this blog. The first thing I wrote about was my Sparcstation 20, which I had just acquired at the time. I installed NetBSD 4.01 on it, which was reasonable then, but has become quite out of date now. So 186 posts and 3 years later I’m in the process of upgrading the machine to NetBSD 6.1.5.

Machine without the PSU

This has been a long time coming, and there are a number of reasons for the upgrade. Firstly, the older version of NetBSD was becoming more difficult to keep software up to date on. I had stuck with 4.01 for some time because of performance issues I had when trying out 6.1.2 last year. But some packages didn’t update properly lately and I had been left with some software working and others just becoming broken. I could have stuck with an older version of pkgsrc, but that has problems as well.

Another reason is I’ve received the hardware required to use the machine as a desktop machine with screen,keyboard and mouse instead of a headless server. I retired the machine from active server duty and built a replacement server quite recently to facilitate both upgrading the OS and hardware to try and make it a practical desktop workstation. I was very fortunate to receive a donation of a keyboard and mouse suitable for the machine, and have since bought the frame buffer card and adapter to complete the hardware necessary.

Frame Buffer

I got the hardware up and running last weekend and powered up the machine with everything set up for the first time. I was happy that without upgrading the OS, I had the display, keyboard and mouse all working with an X server with little effort. I was impressed that the X server seemed quite speedy compared to what I expected. However X server (Xsun) was really outdated and didn’t seem to support everything thrown at it.

So I began to install NetBSD 6.1.4. I found it was best to use the serial console for the install as the install disk does not handle the sun console on the frame buffer properly. It seems that it just doesn’t have the TERMCAP entries for the sun console, as once the system is installed the console works fine. The install worked pretty much the same as the older version with a few minor changes. The performance of 6.1.4 seemed better than the last time I tried an upgrade, but still isn’t as fast as the older 4.01 release.

So I’ve begun building the system from sources to take advantage of the V8 Supersparc. I’m assuming the binary distributions you download are actually built for the slower V7 Sparc that can be common in some of the other older and slower machines. The build process is surprisingly very easy to follow. We will see if there is any significant difference when it’s finished building.

 

Upgrading the SparcStation

This weekend I was fortunate in that I finally got another mbus module for my Sparcstation 20. I was however  unfortunate in that my data drive in it has failed. Because I back up on a regular basis, nothing much was lost, just some work I had done over the week that I also have stored elsewhere.

The machine had only 2 2Gb drives in it previously so I decided I would take the opportunity to also upgrade the hard disks. I had two fujitsu 18G  10K rpm drives set aside for just this purpose. Seeing as this would mean re-installing the OS, I thought I’d give the latest NetBSD (6.1.2) a try on the machine.

The mbus module I got is a SM61 that fortunately works out-of-the-box with the dual 50Mhz processor board I already have. Sun Sparc machines are unusual in that they support mismatched processors running in the same system. In this case as long as the motherboard is happy, and the processors are the same architecture (supersparc) everything is peachy.

So I burned a copy of the NetBSD 6.1.2 install disk and began the installation process. I noticed straight away a performance difference between 6.1.2 and the older 4.0.1. It seemed bogged down and slow compared to the older release for some reason, and the install disk would not extract the system from the CD. I had to instead use HTTP to get the base system installed.

I installed some packages including a benchmark utility called bytebench. Benchmarks like it are useful for determining if there is any change in speed of the system. I was unimpressed that the test results said the machine was _slower_ despite having an extra processor and faster hard disks. The old NetBSD with old hard disks and only 2 cpus would get about 7.2, where as the new setup maxed out at 6.2.

It may be possible that it requires a recompile to make it work faster. I suspect the distribution is compiled for the lowest cpu in mind, a V7 sparc. This system has V8 processors and should be faster. I however don’t really want to spend the time compiling the entire system, just for what might be a small gain.

Instead I’m reinstalling the old 4.0.1 version of NetBSD. Fortunately there isn’t much disadvantage in doing so. I’ve been able to build packages from recent versions of pkgsrc without a problem, and everything seems to work. I noticed the improved speed as soon as I fired up the installer. I have a bunch of binary package builds from the last install I had so that will also save me some time. I may try building this system from sources eventually if I have time, we’ll see if it makes a difference.

ESR Meter, Logic Probe and a Sun Frame Buffer

Recently I built two kits that I was given for my birthday. I had asked Dad for them as they will later help me diagnose and hopefully repair old computer electronics, well at least I hope so. The first kit is a simple logic probe, the second an ESR meter. I’ve assembled a few kits before so I’m not the best at soldering but I’m good enough for through hole components. Fortunately these kits were through hole only.

Kits

The logic probe was by far the easier one to build, mostly because of the smaller number of components. It consists of a single logic chip filled with NOR gates and some basic passive components around it. It took about 2 and a half hours to complete with pretty much no problems. For those who don’t know a logic probe basically will tell you is a line is high or low, and with this probe it can also detect floating lines (a voltage that is neither high or low). It is a pretty simple device to build and use.

The ESR meter was a completely different kettle of fish. For starters it has many more components, it took me an hour just to position all the resistors on the board there were that many! The size of the pads for the components also seemed closer together and smaller making any soldering work much tighter and more fiddly. Controlling the amount of solder applied to joints helped form, but it was easy to use too much. The chips and display were all socketed which whilst isn’t easier to solder, it does mean you’re less likely to overheat the components. In hindsight I probably could have foregone the sockets as I can solder IC’s with out too much trouble now.

An ESR meter is a useful bit of kit to have for a few different scenarios, the most common being detecting faulty electrolytic capacitors. These caps (as they are commonly known) are a common cause of faults with power supplies, CRT’s, main boards, you name it. It is often an easy fix if you can identify the faulty cap. This is where the ESR meter makes things easier as it can test caps in circuit. If you want to know more about ESR meters look here.

I hope to use both these new tools to solve some issues with some of my older machines.

Frame buffer

Finally, a PCI frame buffer card that I got off ebay recently. It is a Wildcat Expert3D-Lite which has some basic 3D acceleration, I’m hoping to be able to use it as a frame buffer for either my Sun Fire R280 or Sun Fire V440. Unfortunately I did some web searching and it seems unlikely that it will be compatible, but one can hope. In either case it’s a nice addition to the collection.

Inside a Sunfire V440

This weekend I decided to take a look inside my second Sunfire V440 to see if there was anything obvious stopping it from functioning properly. When I got the other machine running I also tested this one and unfortunately it didn’t boot. I have a key to be able to put the machines in diagnostic mode, which I did. There were a large number of messages on the serial terminal that scrolled past quite fast. From what I could read it seemed like one of the processor modules is likely to have bad RAM in it or has failed itself. I had a look to see if anything looked obviously corroded and if a simple cleaning might fix it.

I took some photo’s of the inside for your enjoyment.

Hardware pickup: New Sparc servers!

Now I’m not the one to normally brag about getting new hardware that I’ve acquired (I am collecting on a regular basis), but I have recently been given some hardware that just makes me giddy with excitement! A friend of a friend of mine was looking to get rid of some computer hardware and I was fortunate enough to get to choose some of it to save from the scrap heap. I got 3 Sun Microsystems Sun Fire servers that are in good shape. One is a Sun Fire R280 which is basically complete with the exception of a RAM module that I will have to seek out. It has both its CPU slots populated and a couple of high performance hard drives, so the system is basically complete with that minor exception. The other two systems are both the same: Sun fire V440 machines. These have both been upgraded to have all 4 processors but are missing hard disks at the moment.

Now what will I do with these machine you might ask? Well I’m still deciding but it will certainly be fun setting them up and using them. I will have to dream up some kind of processor intensive use for them. I’m still thinking about which operating system to install on them. Fortunately being one of the newer sparc architectures, most Linux and BSD operating systems will have pretty good support for them. At the moment I’m thinking of putting FreeBSD on one, and Debian on one of the others. I may use the BSD one to build all the packages for the sparc platform just for the heck of it! I’m planning on scrapping one of the V440s for spare parts for the other one. It appears to have a problem I haven’t been able to diagnose yet, but it has many spare parts that may be useful if I ever need to replace any in the working one. There may not be much wrong with it so I will try to get the management console working over serial first to find out what is wrong with it. The serial adapters I have don’t seem to communicate with the V440 machines, but work with the R280. I suspect that the newer ones require different serial adapters that I will have to seek out.

I was hoping to find some parts for my SparcStation 20, I found some hard disks that may fit but didn’t find what I wanted most. I am after a Mbus module that has one or two super sparc processors on it, but was unable to find one. That being said I was very happy to find what I did! I never imagined I would ever get to have machines such as these ones, and I am very very grateful to the person who donated them to me! They certainly will get looked after!