phaq

On a Sun Ultra 5 keyboard and screen are used as default input/output devices. This causes the serial port not to be used by default, at least not unless you send a keypress over an attached terminal.

To change this behaviour, two values need to be changed in OpenBoot.
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Connecting a standard PC-Monitor to an SGI causes usually no problems as long as it supports sync-on-green, sometimes also referred to as composite-sync signal. All usual high end monitors and the better flat screens support sync-on-green, a list of compatible monitors is available at the Linux for Playstation 2 website.

If you are lucky and have an SGI 13W3-to-VGA cable at hands, your monitor will most likely work like a charm.
But what happens if you only have on of those generic SUN 13W3-to-VGA adaptors at hand?
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I recently acquired two additional CPU modules for my ancient E450 through eBay.

When they arrived today I couldn’t resist any longer: I simply had to rip the cover off the machine and put them inside…

These are the babies, two UltraSparc II modules and the DC power converters:

This is where the DC power converters will fit in, it’s always one per CPU module. Actually it’s not hard to get the CPU modules at last, it’s the DC converters which are usually quiet expensive. Luckily enough I could get them for only 29 € per piece

And this is what it looks like when they’re fitted:

Now it’s time to plug the CPU modules…

Gosh! Looks awesome, does it!?

Now it’s time to see…

… if it works. Hmm…. the serial console says only ‘connected’ …

*sigh* I’m just to nervous! After a few seconds OpenBoot reports ’4 x UltraSparc-II 296 MHz’.

But before I could actually boot into FreeBSD, I had to change a setting to ensure that OpenBoot would report all installed CPUs to the OS. So in OpenBoot I typed:

{0} ok setenv .upa-noprobe-mask 0
{0} ok reset-all

This would reset the CPU probing mechanism and reboot the machine.

If I had done so in the first place (which I actually didn’t), FreeBSD would have found all CPUs (which it apparently didn’t, it reported only three CPUs at the beginning).
My thanks go to Marcel for helping me in finding the lost CPU.
So even FreeBSD seems to like it after all

# dmesg|grep cpu
cpu0: Sun Microsystems UltraSparc-II Processor (296.00 MHz CPU)
cpu1: Sun Microsystems UltraSparc-II Processor (296.00 MHz CPU)
cpu2: Sun Microsystems UltraSparc-II Processor (296.00 MHz CPU)
cpu3: Sun Microsystems UltraSparc-II Processor (296.00 MHz CPU)

It was not very obvious and took me quiet some time to find out why two recently acquired Sun SS20 machines did not recognize IBM SCA hard drives.
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