Solarises for older sparcstations?

[Ghazan Haider]

Hi,

Ive had trouble finding the hardware requirements of Solaris 8 or 7
for Sun hardware to check if my sparcstation 2 can get an operating
system. Can Solaris 8 run on the Sparcstation 2? (its not too
different from SS10, I wonder why support for it was dropped).

On a related note Ive seen Sun ATM cards and Sun FDDI sbus cards
specify the SS5 or SS10 as a minimum. Why is that?

[Akop Pogosian]

Ghazan Haider <ghazan@ghazan.haider.name> wrote:

> Hi,

> Ive had trouble finding the hardware requirements of Solaris 8 or 7
> for Sun hardware to check if my sparcstation 2 can get an operating
> system. Can Solaris 8 run on the Sparcstation 2? (its not too

No. It is also fairly different from SS10. SS10 is sun4m kernel
architecture machine while SS2 used to be sun4c. Solaris 7 is the
newest Solaris version that can run on sun4c machines.

> On a related note Ive seen Sun ATM cards and Sun FDDI sbus cards
> specify the SS5 or SS10 as a minimum. Why is that?

Probably SS2 is too slow to operate them efficiently and/or there is
also technical incompatibility.

--
Akop Pogosian

This space has been accidentally left blank.

[Tony Walton]

Ghazan Haider wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Ive had trouble finding the hardware requirements of Solaris 8 or 7
> for Sun hardware to check if my sparcstation 2 can get an operating
> system. Can Solaris 8 run on the Sparcstation 2?

No. Solaris 7 at the latest

> (its not too
> different from SS10,

Not true. They are of different architectures. The SS10 is a sun4m
machine (which will run anything up to Solaris 9). An SS2 is a sun4c
machine. The different architectures used different processors. The
sun4m used a superSPARC and sun4c something else which I forget - just a
SPARC, perhaps? While these are binary compatible they do have different
requirements for things like MMUs and other support hardware. One
difference is that the sun4m can be multiprocessor (guess what the 'm'
in sun4m is said by some to stand for?) and sun4c can't.

> I wonder why support for it was dropped).

For much the same reason as Ford dropped support for the Model T :-)

>
> On a related note Ive seen Sun ATM cards and Sun FDDI sbus cards
> specify the SS5 or SS10 as a minimum. Why is that?

Probably because they won't work in architectures prior to sun4m. sun4c
(SS2) is *very* old, they were last supported in 1998 which means the
last new ones were sold some 10 years ago.

--
Tony