[mythtv-users] Matrox Millennium G400 MAX

[Brian Wood]

On Monday, October 04, 2010 01:42:49 pm aaron wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 15:29, Brian Wood <beww at beww.org> wrote:
> > There is even a reasonably active Sparc port of Debian, it's been updated
> > many times this year. Those old machines were great, built like tanks
> > (in the USA), and very well-engineered.
> 
> Heh, maybe I should try installing that on the old Ultra I have
> sitting under my desk collecting dust. I tried upgrading it from
> Solaris 9 to Solaris 10 a couple of years ago and got a rude message
> telling me that the hardware is obsolete. As if. ;-)
> 
> It runs at 150 MHz, I think. And Solaris 9 defaulted to 32-bit mode
> because there was some hardware bug or somesuch that could lock up the
> machine in 64-bit mode if the CPU was less than 200 MHz :)

Check this out:

About 64-bit SPARC support

The Debian SPARC port, as mentioned above, does support the sun4u (“Ultra”) architecture. It uses a 64-bit kernel 
(compiled with gcc 3.3 or newer), but most of the applications run in 32-bit. This is also called a “32-bit userland”.

The Debian SPARC 64 (a.k.a., “UltraLinux”) porting effort is not currently conceived as a full porting effort like other 
ports. Rather, it is intended to be an add-on to the SPARC Port.

In fact, there is really no point in having all applications running in 64-bit mode. Full 64-bit mode involves a 
significant overhead (memory and disk size) with often no benefit. Some applications really can benefit from being in 64-bit 
mode, and that is the purpose of this porting effort. 


> 
> I never tried putting Myth on it, but it would run DB2 v8. Barely.


It *should* be able to run a Myth B/E, if using an HDHR, or possibly even a USB capture device. You'd probably have to 
compile yourself, but that's no big deal.

But they are power hogs by today's standards, and probably not worth the effort except as a "proof of concept" exercise.