E40165-01
March 2013
Abstract
This document contains information on the first release of Oracle Linux 6 for SPARC. This document may be updated after it is released. To check for updates to this document, refer to the Oracle Linux 6 documentation library on the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) Web site:
http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E37670_01/index.html
This document is intended for users and administrators of Oracle Linux. It describes potential issues and the corresponding workarounds you may encounter while using Oracle Linux 6 on the SPARC platform. Oracle recommends that you read this document before installing or upgrading Oracle Linux 6 for SPARC.
Document generated on: 2013-03-21 (revision: 631)
Table of Contents
The Oracle Linux 6.4 for SPARC Release Notes provides a summary of the most notable changes and differences and lists known issues and possible workarounds for Oracle Linux 6.4 for SPARC.
This document is written for system administrators who want to use Oracle Linux on the SPARC platform. It is assumed that readers have a general understanding of the Linux operating system.
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Table of Contents
Oracle Linux 6.4 for SPARC is the first public release of Oracle Linux on the SPARC architecture. It was built from the same source packages as the corresponding Oracle Linux distribution for the x86 architecture, plus any required patches and modifications to support the SPARC platform.
This document outlines the most notable changes and differences and lists known issues and possible workarounds. It is an addendum to the Oracle Linux 6 Update 4 Release Notes for x86:
Oracle Linux for SPARC is a pure 64-bit operating system and can only work on a 64-bit SPARC CPU. Installation on 32-bit SPARC processors is not supported. You can install Oracle Linux for SPARC on bare metal servers and Oracle VM Server for SPARC (formerly known as Logical Domains).
Any SPARC CPU model that supports the sun4v
architecture (that is,
all UltraSPARC T, SPARC T4, T5, M5 and Fujitsu SPARC64-X) should be capable of running
Oracle Linux for SPARC.
Oracle Linux for SPARC has been built and tested on the following systems/platforms:
Fujitsu M10-1, M10-4, and M10-4S (using firmware version XCP2040 or later)
Oracle or Sun T4-1, T4-2, T5-2, T4-4, T5-8, M5, and M10
Oracle VM Server for SPARC version 3.0 (see Preinstallation Tasks and Requirements in the Oracle VM Installation and Upgrade Guide for Release 3.2.1)
The Hardware Certification List at http://linux.oracle.com/hardware-certifications lists all SPARC systems that are certified to work with Oracle Linux for SPARC.
For information about known issues related to peripheral support (for example, network or storage adapters), see Section 2.2, “Known Issues and Limitations”.
Oracle Linux 6.4 for SPARC is built from the same source files as the Oracle Linux 6.4 release for the x86 platform. A number of packages were amended to compile on the SPARC architecture. These portability changes were applied on top of the existing source archives. In many cases, the changes only related to the RPM specification files that define how to compile the source code and package the resulting binaries. In some cases, changes to the actual source code were necessary. All of these patches are available in the source RPM packages.
Due to the fundamental differences of the SPARC and PC architecture, some additional changes were necessary. The most notable changes are the use of the SILO boot loader instead of GRUB and the removal of some x86-specific packages. The configuration of the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel has been adapted to the SPARC environment. A number of SPARC-specific patches have been incorporated to better support the features that are available on this architecture. In addition, drivers for devices that are not available on the SPARC architecture have been disabled in the kernel configuration.
The Red Hat compatible kernel is not included. The system installs and boots the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel by default.
There is no separate boot ISO image for the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel.
Btrfs is not supported on the root file system.
Ksplice is not yet supported. This is planned for a future update release of Oracle Linux for SPARC.
DTrace is not yet supported. This is planned for a future update release of Oracle Linux for SPARC.
The following RPM packages have been added to the distribution to better support Linux on SPARC:
elftoaout
The elftoaout utility converts a static ELF binary to a static
a.out
binary. If you use an ELF system on SPARC, run
elftoaout on the kernel image so that the SPARC PROM can network
boot the image.
genromfs
The genromfs tool creates romfs file systems, which are lightweight, read-only file systems that are supported by the Oracle Linux kernel. Romfs file systems are mainly used to create initial RAM disks during installation.
piggyback
The piggyback utilities are designed to attach an initial ram
disk to an a.out
-format kernel image.
pigz
The pigz utility is a fully functional replacement for gzip. Its parallel implementation exploits multiple processors and multiple cores to the maximum extent possible when compressing data.
prtconf
The prtconf utility dumps the SPARC OpenPROM device tree in a compact, readable format similar to that produced by prtconf on Oracle Solaris. It also allows you to change OpenPROM options.
silo
The silo
package installs the SILO (Sparc Improved LOader) boot
loader, which you need to boot the Oracle Linux kernel on a SPARC system. SILO installs
onto your system's boot block and you can configure it to boot Oracle Linux, Oracle
Solaris, and SunOS.
v4l-utils
This package contains video4linux2 utilities.
In addition to the kernel itself, many RPM packages have been modified to compile and work on the SPARC architecture. In most cases, the changes relate to the RPM building process and minor portability issues.
The following packages have been modification to accommodate the differences required by the SPARC architecture:
anaconda
The installer has been modified to accommodate changes to path names, differences in disk partitioning, package grouping, networking, boot loader configuration, and a different kernel. For performance reasons, calls to gzip have been replaced by pigz.
binutils
The GNU binary utilities have been modified to provide the required opcodes for the T4 crypto instructions.
gcc
Multiarch support has been disabled.
gdb
The GNU debugger has been modified to work around SPARC toolchain issues (for example, memory alignments).
glibc
The GNU C Library has been updated to fix an issue in SHMLBA helper function and multiarch support has been disabled.
initscripts
Modifications to LDOM have been applied in addition to a few extra console rules.
NetworkManager
The dispatcher does not warn about an invalid connection for the
hostname
action.
openssl
The openssl
package has been modified to provide support for the
built-in encryption functions of the SPARC T4/T5 chip. The T4 crypto engine implements
acceleration for the following cryptographic algorithms:
Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithms:
aes-128-cbc
, aes-192-cbc
,
aes-256-cbc
, aes-128-ctr
,
aes-192-ctr
, aes-256-ctr
,
aes-128-cfb8
, aes-192-cfb8
,
aes-256-cfb8
, aes-128-ecb
,
aes-192-ecb
, and aes-256-ecb
Data Encryption Standard (DES) algorithms:
des-cbc
, des-ede3-cbc
,
des-ecb
, and des-ede3-ecb
Cryptographic hash functions:
md5
, sha1
, sha224
,
sha256
, sha384
, and
sha512
You can use the openssl speed
command to test the speed of these
algorithms. To test the speed without T4 acceleration, set the
OPENSSL_DISABLE_T4
environment variable to any value.
parted
Sun disk label support has been implemented.
procps
The buffer size has been increased from 64 to 128 KB to handle the additional
information provided via /proc/stat
.
udev
The udev dynamic device manager has been updated to support virtual devices that Oracle VM creates for SPARC client device drivers.
ypbind
The script /etc/dhcp/dhclient.d/nis.sh
failed to preserve the
SELinux context on /etc/yp.conf
. This would have lead to the system
not starting up any services when performing a minimum install in an environment where
the DHCP server advertised a NIS domain.
If you want to learn more about the individual changes, you can use the following command to view the RPM change logs for a specified package:
#rpm -q --changelog
package
When compared with the corresponding x86 release, the following packages are not included on the SPARC version:
cpuspeed
dmidecode
firefox
grub
- GRUB boot loader
kernel
- Red Hat compatible kernel (2.6.32)
valgrind
These packages were either not required on the SPARC architecture (but might have been replaced with SPARC-specific counterparts) or did not build due to portability issues. Those packages that did not build due to portability issues will be provided as individual downloads from the Unbreakable Linux Network and the Public Yum Server as soon as these issues have been resolved.
This chapter describes the important patches and modifications, known issues, and limitations for the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2.
Oracle Linux for SPARC boots an optimized version of the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2 (2.6.39), including enhancements and modifications that are required to better support the SPARC sunv4 architecture. The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2 for SPARC is based on the same source code as the x86 version plus the SPARC-specific modifications.
The following important patches and modifications have been made in this release:
InfiniBand support has been disabled
(CONFIG_INFINIBAND=n
).
CONFIG_NO_HZ
has been disabled.
CONFIG_NODES_SHIFT
has been increased from 4 to 5 to support
SPARC systems with up to 32 sockets.
CONFIG_NR_CPUS
has been increased from 256 to 4096 to support
SPARC systems with a large number of strands, cores, or sockets.
Patches have been added to properly identify the new CPUs in
/proc/cpuinfo
, for example, SPARC M5 and SPARC64-X.
Patches have been added to enable many SPARC-specific performance improvements.
The openprom
kernel driver has been enabled.
The following device driver modules have been disabled for SPARC:
dme1737
f71805f
and f71882fg
ipmi_si
it87
lightning
lm78
mk712
ns588
pc87360
and pc87427
radeon
and radeon_kms
sch5627
smsc47b397
and smsc47m1
snd-mtpav
tmp_atmel
tpm_nsc
and tpm_tis
vt1211
w83627ehf
and w83627hf
This section describes known issues in this release.
The SILO boot loader is still compiled as a 32-bit binary. To work around the
architecture detection functionality of rpm, the package is a
noarch
RPM. This is a temporary workaround until SILO has been made
fully 64-bit safe.
On some systems (for example, T5) with an Intel10 Gigabit PCI-Express network adapter,
the ixgbe
network driver fails to load with an invalid MAC
address
error. Currently, there is no workaround and this device can not be
used.
On systems (for example, T4-1) with a MegaRAID SAS HBA, the megasas
driver module fails with a Failed to init firmware/FW in FAULT state
error. Currently, the driver module does not work on big-endian architectures such as SPARC.
A fix is in preparation and will be made available.
When changing the virtual network link status of a domain, the virtual switch emits a
signal via the logical domain channels (LDCs) to all other domains. As a result, binding or
unbinding other guest domains might cause an active guest domain to crash. The workaround is
to use either the ldm add-vsw or ldm set-vsw command
to set inter-vnet-link=off
for the virtual switch configuration, for
example:
#ldm set-vsw inter-vnet-link=off
vswitch-name
When the inter-vnet-link
property is set to off
,
LDC channels are not configured between virtual network devices for inter-vnet
communications. Instead, LDC channels are assigned only for communication between each
virtual network device and the virtual switch.
If rmmod and modprobe are used to unload and
subsequently reload the sunvnet
kernel module, the system can crash with
a kernel panic.
If the stack trace refers to tlb_fixup_done
, try starting the
installation by passing numa=off
as a boot parameter.
Bootstrapping an installation over the network by using boot net:dhcp
at the OpenBoot prompt (similar to using PXE boot on x86) is not supported.
The LDOM guest network driver currently does not provide support for the
netpoll
interface, which is required to enable the
netconsole
driver.
During system boot, SELinux may output messages such as the following:
SELinux: Permission audit_access in class file not defined in policy. SELinux: Permission audit_access in class dir not defined in policy. SELinux: Permission execmod in class dir not defined in policy. SELinux: Permission audit_access in class lnk_file not defined in policy. SELinux: Permission open in class lnk_file not defined in policy. SELinux: Permission execmod in class lnk_file not defined in policy. SELinux: Permission audit_access in class chr_file not defined in policy. SELinux: Permission audit_access in class blk_file not defined in policy. SELinux: Permission execmod in class blk_file not defined in policy. SELinux: Permission audit_access in class sock_file not defined in policy. SELinux: Permission execmod in class sock_file not defined in policy. SELinux: Permission audit_access in class fifo_file not defined in policy. SELinux: Permission execmod in class fifo_file not defined in policy. SELinux: Permission syslog in class capability2 not defined in policy. SELinux: the above unknown classes and permissions will be allowed
These classes have not yet been fully adapted to the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel. You can ignore these messages as they are not critical.
Oracle Linux 6.4 for SPARC is available as ISO installation media from the Oracle Software Delivery Cloud (http://e-delivery.oracle.com/linux) and as individual RPM packages from the Unbreakable Linux Network (http://linux.oracle.com) and the Public Yum Server (http://public-yum.oracle.com).
The distribution can be installed both as a guest domain in Oracle VM Server for SPARC (formerly known as Logical Domains) or on a bare metal server. See the instructions in the Installation Guide for Oracle Linux 6.4 for SPARC, which is available at http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E37670_01/index.html.
If you have questions regarding configuring or using yum to install updates, refer to the Oracle Linux Administrator's Solutions Guide at http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E37670_01/index.html.
The kernel's source code is available via a public git source code repository at http://oss.oracle.com/git.