Hi,
Does anyone have any experience with this HW on BSD. I can't find
specifics on the NICs used on Suns webpage. What are they and are they
well supported? This seems like the perfect package for my purposes.
Regards,
Edvard

efagerho (AT) cc (DOT) hut.fi wrote:
Hi,

Does anyone have any experience with this HW on BSD. I can't find
specifics on the NICs used on Suns webpage. What are they and are they
well supported? This seems like the perfect package for my purposes.

Regards,
Edvard

There has been a fair amount of discussion of these on the list
My experience with have been in general good.
nic is a broadcom that shows up as a bge device.
The other is an nvidia that shows up as an nfe device.

Do keep in mind that the raid controller is not actually a raid
controller. So no HW Raid1. I have not tried to use the LM module yet,
though I have some for my next pair.

In epistula a efagerho (AT) cc (DOT) hut.fi die horaque Mon, 5 Feb 2007 19:02:44
+0200:

Hi,

Does anyone have any experience with this HW on BSD. I can't
find specifics on the NICs used on Suns webpage. What are they and
are they well supported? This seems like the perfect package for my
purposes.

Regards,
Edvard

HTH,

timo

Michael Taylor
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Message
From: owner-misc (AT) openbsd (DOT) org [mailto:owner-misc (AT) openbsd (DOT) org] Behalf
Dag Richards
Sent: February-05-07 2:23 PM
To: misc (AT) openbsd (DOT) org
Subject: Re: Sun Fire X2100 M2

efagerho (AT) cc (DOT) hut.fi wrote:
Hi,

Does anyone have any experience with this HW on BSD. I can't find
specifics on the NICs used on Suns webpage. What are they and are they
well supported? This seems like the perfect package for my purposes.

Regards,
Edvard

There has been a fair amount of discussion of these on the list
My experience with have been in general good.
nic is a broadcom that shows up as a bge device.
The other is an nvidia that shows up as an nfe device.

Do keep in mind that the raid controller is not actually a raid
controller. So no HW Raid1. I have not tried to use the LM module yet,
though I have some for my next pair.

>Does anyone have any experience with this HW on BSD. I can't find
>specifics on the NICs used on Suns webpage. What are they and are they
>well supported? This seems like the perfect package for my purposes.
>
There has been a fair amount of discussion of these on the list

not so much about M2, it's mostly been about the non-M2 version.

I have not tried to use the LM module yet,
though I have some for my next pair.

A bit offtopic but they get mentioned somewhat often here and
I don't think I've seen this mentioned before:

With the non-M2 one, if you want to use LM with the machine
booted, you must disable the bge(4) and just use the nfe(4).
(this is the opposite of what you want if you'd like to handle
really high traffic flows )

mine are just on the usual masterswitch, cisco 25xx/26xx+conserver
combo instead (pity about the non-rj45 serial ports, oh wellthat's
what netras are for :)

Hi,

Thanks for the input about the X2100 M2. This seems to be exactly what
I was looking for. I've still got two questions, which is T regarding
BSD

Sun's webpages you'll only find options for a 250GB and 500GB SATA
drive. Their manual also states that the M2 only supports drives of
250GB and 500GB. This seems like they're only listing the hardware
that they provide support for and not what the BIS actually supports?
It does have an MCP 55 Pro chipset, so it should support any SATA
drive, right? As I've got some 36GB WD Raptor SATA I drives, I was
going to use them instead of the drives Sun provides.

The second question is that are the drive bays empty or do they have
HD sleds in them? Also can you install any DVD-drive you want into it
and does the DVD require SATA or a PATA connection? I'm only going to
need a DVD for installation.

Sun didn't want to answer the first question, so I hope some of you
who have seen the box could answer these questions.

Thanks,
Edvard

I just picked one an X2100 M2 a few days ago

I'm running 2x 320GB Seagate SATA drives in it, no problem so it's
because they're only listing what they support, not what the hardware
supports.

There are HD sleds, well, more like HD rails. They do the job, and will
allow you to hot swap drives. You would need a slim optical drive, and
the cable they provide is not standard IDE. It appears to be a smaller
ide-like cable, probably what's used in notebooks but I haven't looked
too closely.

The same trick with disabling the broadcom nics used on the non-M2 works
with the M2 also. I haven't gotten around to testing out BSD on
mine, just FreeBSD so far. The nvidia NIC's using the ported nfe driver
appears to be working with the e1000phy patch, so I imagine they would
work under BSD. No luck getting serial console output through remote
management, or through the serial port in service processor mode. Serial
console output works fine if you force the serial port to system mode
instead.

By the way, anyone have any pointers on how one could make a quick hack
to have BSD ignore the 2nd broadcom NIC, so you can still use the
1st one and still have the remote management working? I'm reasonably
familiar with C, but I haven't poked around the BSD code enough to
know where to start (aside from if_nfe.c).

Cheers,
Han

Edvard Fagerholm wrote:
Hi,

Thanks for the input about the X2100 M2. This seems to be exactly what
I was looking for. I've still got two questions, which is T regarding
BSD

Sun's webpages you'll only find options for a 250GB and 500GB SATA
drive. Their manual also states that the M2 only supports drives of
250GB and 500GB. This seems like they're only listing the hardware
that they provide support for and not what the BIS actually supports?
It does have an MCP 55 Pro chipset, so it should support any SATA
drive, right? As I've got some 36GB WD Raptor SATA I drives, I was
going to use them instead of the drives Sun provides.

The second question is that are the drive bays empty or do they have
HD sleds in them? Also can you install any DVD-drive you want into it
and does the DVD require SATA or a PATA connection? I'm only going to
need a DVD for installation.

Sun didn't want to answer the first question, so I hope some of you
who have seen the box could answer these questions.

Thanks,
Edvard