I’ve got it working!
What about Solaris x86? It’s buggy, it’s a pain, it needs manual hacking to install, it hates the ATAPI subsystem, and it doesn’t want to support the internal NIC, but thanks to these drivers, it works well enough – I’ll show it. I’m pretty sure I can coerce this beta audio driver into working with the SiS 7012 as well. Yes, I need this OS for development. It’s not my first choice… ;)
#uname -a SunOS procyon 5.9 Generic_112234-07 i86pc i386 i86pc- ifconfig -a
lo0: flags=1000849
Ok, so, it’s not pretty, nor is it easy. First, you need to disable APIC and PnP in the BIOS. If you’re installing to ATA, disable UDMA (for now).
Boot from your install media, and once you get to probing for devices, it will most likely bomb out with ‘APIC and NON-APIC device sharing Xxxx’, with a DMA of 2. This is your floppy. Go into the configuration assistant, disable the floppy and the controller, then boot as per usual.
Configure your installation, tell it the machine IS networked, et al… It’ll gripe that DNS is wrong (no supported NIC), but just tell it to ‘Accept’. Get the install finished and booting.
Here’s the tricky part. If you had to disable the floppy, and you have no network, how do you get the NIC drivers (above) on the system? I used an old 4x CDRW disc, personally.
The precompiled i386 binaries in the driver tree will install into the default Solaris 9/x86 08/03 kernel – MAKE SURE YOU READ THE README AND SET YOUR MAC ADDRESS FIRST!
Now then, create your /etc/hostname.sfe0, get your patches, update and upgrade the kernel – you’re all set to install the audio driver (I have yet to do this..).
This board is not what I’d consider ‘Solaris friendly’, but I place the blame on Solaris/x86. The APIC issues are annoying, but, I can see past that. The ATA driver is hokey as hell, and really, I wouldn’t suggest this OS on the internal ATA controller, unless you love Solaris, or just hate yourself – this board is better supported with virtually any other OS, be it Linux, BSD, or even Vsta. ;)
With my ATA100 Fujitsu, I had no end of problems, from partitioning to mere accessing. It bitches that it can’t sync, can’t write – all with a perfectly fine and tested cable, and of course, the disk works fine under alternative operating systems.
Get an Adaptec 2940 if you have to, and some cheap UW disks – anything, just don’t run on the internal IDE.
Of course, drivers for various x86 hardware is quite shy – it does have fairly generic support – but, it’s just that. USB is semi-functional, most VGA cards are accessable via the VESA framebuffer driver, if nothing else – but there’s certainly no advantage to Solaris/x86’s driver base.