[rescue] The Non Booting Ultra 1 mystery solved

[David Brownlee]

On Fri, 12 Apr 2024 at 21:55, Todd Vernon via rescue <rescue at sunhelp.org> wrote:
>
> Though I would report back since several of you were so kind to offer suggestions.   For a refresher I have an Ultra 1 that would run NetBSD just fine and boot the NetBSD install CD but could not boot any Solaris Install Image from CD or Image on Zulu.
>
> By chance I noticed that the year was wrong in the date.  Everything else in the Timekeeper was fine.  When I noticed the date being incorrect I set it and powered down and rebooted it.  Again the date was wrong but the rest of IDPROM was still correct.  I happened to have another Timekeeper with an external battery so I popped it in and reprogrammed IDPROM.
>
> Solaris Install CD’s and images would then boot into the installer.  Apparently, not all of Timekeeper fails simultaneously.  There must be other values stored in there other than what you can see because I doubt the date was keeping the installer from running.  Six months debugging finished!

Nice catch :) It is always nice to see perfectly good hardware able to
run its original OS.

> The reason I was even pursuing this entire thing is 64 bit NetBSD runs SUPER slow on my Ultra 1.  Compile times on my U1 are 2x my Sun IPC!  I did a quick install of 2.6 on Zulu last night and compile times of the same library are more inline with my SS10 now.  Still a bit slower than I would expect but I believe 2.6 is a 32bit OS and the Zulu pegs out at 10Mb/sec.   Going expand the testing to Solaris 7 or 8 and 20Mbit SSD that I have.

One point to note is that NetBSD for its sins tends to ship with a
relatively recent version of gcc, and recent gcc heavily leans into
spending as much CPU and memory as possible during compile time to try
to gain benefit at runtime. So any recent gcc is going to be awful on
an Ultra 1, no matter the OS.

If you had the time (and the inclination :), I wonder what relative
NetBSD and Solaris performance would be on the Ultra 1 for non-compile
tasks (maybe a web server, some scripting tasks?) I'd expect Solaris
to do quite well on network related tasks...

David