I just downloaded the 2004.3 sparc64 release and am attempting to install it on a Sunblade 150 with 768MB of RAM and a 40GB hard drive installed. While I can get farther than I did than the previous release, it is still highly unstable. This is with both the minimal and universal live CDs. 1. At least 50% of the time it locks up when it attempts to mount the cdrom. The only way to recover is to power cycle. It hangs at the line "Attempting to mount CD:- /newroot/dev/cdroms/cdrom0 2. Whenever I attempt to mount a ext3 filesystem the system crashes unless I first manually load the ext3 module (modprobe ext3). It sometimes crashes when loading this module. 3. If I can mount the file system, the system frequently crashes whenever doing disk access (i.e. untarring files). I have tried turning off dma (hdparm -d 0 /dev/hda) but this makes no difference. Note that this is on a stock Sunblade 150, no extra hardware has been installed.
Try passing the boot argument "ide=nodma" to the kernel you choose. The IDE controller in the Blades lacks the ability to checksum, so if DMA is on at all anywhere it can create havoc.
Need more info to figure out if ide=nodma worked or not.
