Date: Thu, 10 Dec 1998 01:37:12 -0800 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.cdrom.com> To: Christopher Nielsen <cnielsen@pobox.com> Cc: core@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-sparc@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Need some advice about FreeBSD UltraSPARC port Message-ID: <29826.913282632@zippy.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 10 Dec 1998 00:43:24 PST." <Pine.BSF.4.05.9812100030010.353-100000@ender.sf.scient.com>
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> A friend within Sun is offering to make introductions to the appropriate > people to discuss official support from Sun for an UltraSPARC port of > FreeBSD. This could possibly include donated hardware and engineer support > from within Sun. Before I proceed with this, I want to get the opinion of > the core team and everyone else working on the port as to whether I should > pursue this at all. I'm certainly all in favor of this and would be more than happy to talk to anyone at Sun who needs further details on who we are and what we're trying to do, but I can also say that this is going to be 100X easier if Sun (where Sun == this particular group of people, anyway) already knows who we are and is sold on the merits of supporting FreeBSD (or open source BSD in general) on the SPARC architecture. I say this because I'm frankly a little surprised to hear that there's any interest at all there given that I'd have thought that backing Solaris and Linux as the two "official" Unix OSes for the SPARC would be enough for any company (not that I agree, but I'm a realistic here) and I'd be very curious to know why they want to back FreeBSD as well. If it's for all the right and enlightened reasons we're already familiar with then rah rah rah and full speed ahead, let's go for it. If it's for the wrong reasons, or insufficiently clarified reasons, then I'd be afraid of things falling through unexpectedly the same way they did last time Sun talked about backing FreeBSD on the SPARC. That's my only reservation. > please feel free to jump in and correct me. At the moment it looks like we > have the toolchain to do cross-compilation from x86 to sparc64-elf with > the beginning of a port of the MD parts of the kernel. It's not much, but You'll want to look into egcs 1.1.1 then - it will in all likelyhood form the basis of the compiler technology which you'll actually be using by the time that the sparc port is ready to join -current (if all goes well that is). Thanks for the status report, and sorry if I sound negative here, it's just that I don't want people to get their hopes up and dashed again here. If Sun's (more) solidly behind this then so am I. - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-sparc" in the body of the message
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