this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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I agree with all of this.
For me, I think the best "I want the SPARC experience with minimum fuss" boxes are the SS 5/20 (which are very similar machines, the SS20 is sort of a multiprocessor SS5) or the Ultra 1/2 desktop workstations. All of those are SBUS machines (there are PCI machines with the Ultra 2 CPU and chipset, too, I think, but they're not just called "Ultra 2"?).
I also think of Solaris 7 as peak Solaris, I don't think you're alone there @[email protected] . If you want something past Solaris 7, just go with OpenSolaris/OpenIndiana/etc. and do "new Solaris" whole hog.
IIRC, the Ultra 1 and 2 are strictly SBus machines, the all the later Ultra 5/10/30/60/80 are PCI machines, plus most but not all members of the family have UPA slots with that freaky two rows of card edge connector for fancy video boards?
For readers not exposed to lots of Sun lore, Ultras were distinguished from SparcStations because they host 64 bit SPARCv9 parts branded "UltraSPARC," as opposed to the 4m SparcStations which were based on 32-bit SPARCv8 processors.
I'll also add that, if you don't want to fuck around with large pieces of aging hardware and just want to marinate yourself in a retro Solaris environment, the qemu sparc support is really good. Folks restoring Sun stuff with disc issues often do their installs via netboot from an emulated server. Adafruit even has a beginner click-by-click tutorial for spinning your own emulated Sun4m system.
Thanks!