Re: Problem building sparc solaris machine with large memory

[Steve Demko]

Mike,

Wow, did I ever overlook that! I never looked up the machine itself, I just went by what the docs said the memory should be able to be. It now makes sense that I can't go above 512M.

I looked up the rest of the machine models, and the SparcServer does do multi-gig memory, so I will try that next, but if that fails, I will try your ideas with the swap space. Unfortunately, while I can build VMs at home, I can't really test one with the app itself until the Covid-19 shelter-in-place order is lifted and I can get back to the office, but I think you've got me on the right track.

Thank you for your help

Steve

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Date: Wed, 1 Apr 2020 14:04:52 +0000
From: Mike Russo <address@hidden>
To: "address@hidden" <address@hidden>
Subject: Re: Problem building sparc solaris machine with large memory
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        <address@hidden>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

According to Wikipedia, the SPARCstation-20 could support a max of 512MB of memory, and I've only had good results when using that maximum. However, I was able to add a good deal of swap space, and it could even be added on a flash device or a ramdisk if necessary and would be pretty fast. Have you experimented with seeing if your application can run by adding a few gig of swap space?


--

Michael Russo, Systems Engineer PaperSolve, Inc. 268 Watchogue Road Staten Island, NY 10314 Your random quote for today: And miles to go before I sleep. -- Robert Frost

-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Demko <address@hidden<mailto:address@hidden%3e>>
To: address@hidden <address@hidden<mailto:%address@hiddenaddress@hidden%3e>>
Subject: Problem building sparc solaris machine with large memory
Date: Wed, 01 Apr 2020 01:19:50 +0000

I want to keep alive old sparc based app for which we only have binaries that builds large data structures in memory when it runs.

I'm having trouble with building a qemu sparc vm with memory > 512M.
Documents say that sparc machine models other than SS-5 can have up to 2048M, but I haven't been able to get any working.

As an example, this command (running under CentOS 7, with a recently compiled qemu version 4.2.0) works fine with 512M, but fails with -m 1024 or -m 2048:

qemu-system-sparc -M SS-20 -m 512 -cpu "TI SuperSparc 50" -drive file=/vm/ss20.qcow2,if=scsi,bus=0,unit=0,media=disk -drive file=/iso/S9_sw1.iso,bus=0,unit=2,media=cdrom,readonly=on

If I try to just change the memory on a working machine, it just hangs when it tries to boot the hard drive, so I thought maybe the memory config gets written to disk somewhere, so I thought I'd try to just make a brand new  machine with the memory I want.

Here is how it fails when I try to create a brand new machine with large memory and I boot from the cdrom to start the OS install.

0 > boot cdrom:d -vs Not a bootable ELF image
Loading a.out image...
Loaded 7680 bytes
entry point is 0x4000
bootpath: /iommu@f,e0000000/sbus@f,e0001000/espdma@f,400000/esp@f,800000/sd@2,0:d
switching to new context:
Size: 0x41649+0xd52e+0x1ccaa Bytes
SunOS Release 5.9 Version Generic 32-bit
Copyright 1983-2002 Sun Microsystems, Inc.  All rights reserved.
Use is subject to license terms.
out of malloc memory (200)!

panic[cpu0]/thread=f0244020: BAD TRAP: type=7 (Memory address alignment) rp=f0243234 addr=0 mmu_fsr=0 rw=0

: Memory address alignment
out of malloc memory (200)!
out of malloc memory (200)!
out of malloc memory (200)!
qemu: fatal: Trap 0x07 while interrupts disabled, Error state
pc: f017626c  npc: f0176278
%g0-7: 00000000 f0248800 f007fc00 f025ff14 0001002b f0243b88 00000000 f0244020
%o0-7: 00000002 f0260034 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 f025ff28 f005d39c
%l0-7: 40400fc3 f0260034 00000002 00000000 00000000 00000000 f02698a0 00000000
%i0-7: f0262f30 f0260034 00000000 00010000 00000002 00000000 f025ffd8 f004143c
%f00:  0000000000000000 0000000000000000 0000000000000000 0000000000000000
%f08:  0000000000000000 0000000000000000 0000000000000000 0000000000000000
%f16:  0000000000000000 0000000000000000 0000000000000000 0000000000000000
%f24:  0000000000000000 0000000000000000 0000000000000000 0000000000000000
psr: 40000fc3 (icc: ---- SPE: SP-) wim: 00000008
fsr: 00000000 y: 00000000

Aborted (core dumped)

Am I just using the wrong machine or the wrong processor, or am I missing something? I haven't worked my way exhaustively through the list for machines or CPUs, but if anyone has any experience building a bigger memory machine, I'd be glad of the input.



Steve