It’s wonderful that it’s pretty straightforward to netboot a VAX, SPARC, or Alpha computer and root on NFS (it’s a pain on x86 / amd64, though). There are lots of lessons that informed the design of these kinds of machines, and it’s unfortunate that x86 / amd64 never learned them, or where there are similarities, they’re poorly implemented. The best servers give you 100% control of anything you need to do via the serial port.
NetBSD/sparc packages aren’t currently being built because of how much power the systems to build them take, but I’m actively looking for a place to host / colocate. In the meanwhile, there’s a non-trivial number of binary packages for the JavaStation here:
If we talk pre-UEFI PXE, the things everyone implemented is extremely simple, and several vendors still managed to mess things up to the point that the “Universal Network Driver Interface” is hardly universal.
I don’t think I want to see what their attempt at something like NFS would’ve looked like.
It’s wonderful that it’s pretty straightforward to netboot a VAX, SPARC, or Alpha computer and root on NFS (it’s a pain on x86 / amd64, though). There are lots of lessons that informed the design of these kinds of machines, and it’s unfortunate that x86 / amd64 never learned them, or where there are similarities, they’re poorly implemented. The best servers give you 100% control of anything you need to do via the serial port.
NetBSD/sparc packages aren’t currently being built because of how much power the systems to build them take, but I’m actively looking for a place to host / colocate. In the meanwhile, there’s a non-trivial number of binary packages for the JavaStation here:
https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/sparc/10.1/
Glad to see old hardware getting preserved :)
If we talk pre-UEFI PXE, the things everyone implemented is extremely simple, and several vendors still managed to mess things up to the point that the “Universal Network Driver Interface” is hardly universal.
I don’t think I want to see what their attempt at something like NFS would’ve looked like.