Making Sense of Sun Blades and the UltraSPARC-IIe

Okies,

so if you haven’t heard, I am hacking the Sun Blade 150, it’s a machine at school they still run that’s 10 years old. Pathetic. But it’s a good challenge for me to conquer and learn about operating systems at the same time.

So, I was very easily confused and have finally sorted out many things. First of all, the computer in question had several references that it was a Sun Blade 100… You can see why I am off to a bad start..

I eventually determined that I would need my own replica of the machine (not virtualized, cause it looks like a Booty Face). So I went ahead thinking it was a Sun Blade 100 and started getting confused. Good thing I did my homework:

Queried the target machines processing speed:

bazz@blade72[pts/1][~] psrinfo -v
Status of processor 0 as of: 10/06/14 04:11:03
  Processor has been on-line since 03/16/13 13:50:49.
  The sparcv9 processor operates at 550 MHz,
        and has a sparcv9 floating point processor.
bazz@blade72[pts/1][~]

That lil’ command gave us some good info, but not everything. SPARCv9, 550MHz. OK.. what about cpu-arch? This next command gives us everything we want:

bazz@blade72[pts/1][~] kstat | grep -A 20 --text cpu_info
module: cpu_info                        instance: 0
name:   cpu_info0                       class:    misc
        chip_id                         0
        clock_MHz                       550
        cpu_type                        sparcv9
        crtime                          49.678984543
        device_ID                       0
        fpu_type                        sparcv9
        implementation                  UltraSPARC-IIe
        snaptime                        49127245.7381345
        state                           on-line
        state_begin                     1363456249

I also like to do

kstat | grep -a implementation

grep’s -a is the same as –text, as was used because grep complained the output was binary from kstat..

Here is where I got confused:

bazz@blade72[pts/1][~] uname -a
SunOS blade72 5.8 Generic_117350-51 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Blade-100 Solaris

What’s that, Sun-Blade-100?? WTF? AH!! So the system Sun Blade 150 is based on the platform SUNW,Sun-Blade-100.. OK! This is confirmed by the fact that Blade 100’s cannot clock at 550MHz stock.

Another hint was given with the df -h command. Apparently Blade 100 cannot have > 20 GB hard drives, but target had a ~30GB HDD..

It’s not Over – Narrowing Down CPU Architecture

SPARCv9, ultraSPARC-IIe, cool. Looking through the manuals shows that the ultraSPARC-IIe is closely related to the ultraSPARC-IIi. I quote from the IIe userman: “Since the UltraSPARC IIe processor is very similar to the UltraSPARC IIi processor, the UltraSPARC IIi User’s Manual is a necessary companion to UltraSPARC IIe User’s Manual Supplement.. Normally, the UltraSPARC IIi User’s Manual is sufficient as a supplement.”