SPARCstation 5

SPARCstation 5 or SS5 (code-named "Aurora") is a workstation sold by Sun Microsystems. It is based on the sun4m architecture, and is enclosed in a pizza-box chassis. A simplified, cheaper version of the SS5 was later released as the SPARCstation 4. Sun also marketed these same machines under the name "Netra" (Sun continues to sell new machines with this same name), which didn't include framebuffers or keyboards. The package was sold as "set-up and ready to go" webservers, preconfigured with all the requisite software.

pecifications

CPU support

The SPARCstation 5 may incorporate one of the following processors: 70, 85, or 110MHz Texas Instruments microSPARC II, or a 170MHz Fujitsu TurboSPARC, which has compatibility issues with many binary distributions of Linux. Fujitsu also provided a 160MHz TurboSPARC CPU Upgrade Kit for upgrading 70, 85 and 110MHz model. The SPARCstation 5 has no MBus and thus is limited to use as a single-processor machine.

Memory

The SPARCstation 5 has eight DSIMM slots for memory expansion. Slots can be filled individually with either 8Mb or 32Mb modules giving a maximum of 256Mb memory. The memory used is identical to that of the SPARCstation 4.

Disk drives

The SPARCstation 5 can hold two internal 80 pins, single ended, fast-narrow SCA SCSI drives, a SCSI CDROM and a floppy. It also supports external SCSI devices. There is no IDE/ATAPI support.

Network support

The SPARCstation 5 comes with an on-board AMD Lance ethernet chipset providing 10BaseT networking as standard and 10Base2 and 10Base5 via an AUI transceiver. A 10/100Mbit/s hme "Happy Meal" NIC can be added for faster connections. The OpenBoot ROM is able to boot from network, using RARP and TFTP. Like all other SPARCstation systems, the SS5 holds system information such as MAC address and serial number in NVRAM. If the battery on this chip dies, then the system will not be able to boot.

AFX

From [http://obsolyte.com/sun_ss5/ obsolyte] :
*"All Sparcstation 5's came with 3 SBUS slots, and a higher-speed bus known as AFX, which shared it's connection with SBUS slot 3, which also placed it furthest from the power supply. This bus seems to have been exclusively created for higher-speed graphics cards, a "sort-of AGP" that allowed the use of significantly faster and higher capability framebuffers, including a 24-bit model. While I've never actually seen or used an AFX card, they are rumored to exist. The AFX bus seems to have "only" existed for the SS5 series, no other SPARCstation or server of any model ... seems to have this connection."

Operating systems

The following operating systems will run on a SPARCstation 5:
*SunOS 4.1.3_U1B onwards
*Solaris 2.3 Edition II to Solaris 9
*Linux - Most distributions of Linux, as has already been said, have issues running on a TurboSPARC (170MHz) SS5. [http://www.ultralinux.org UltraLinux.org] is an excellent resource for Linux on SPARC systems.
*NetBSD/sparc
*OpenBSD/sparc
*NeXTSTEP

See also

* SPARCstation
* SPARCstation 4

External links

* [http://obsolyte.com/sun_ss5/ Obsolyte: SPARCstation 5]
* [http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub/Systems/SS5/SS5.html Parts List for SPARCstation 5]