Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2000 01:34:52 -0600 From: Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com> To: Martin Minkus <diskiller@diskiller.net> Cc: Gerald Heinig <Gerald.Heinig@post.rwth-aachen.de>, freebsd-sparc@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Anyone out there ? Message-ID: <39F68D1C.45F9F336@softweyr.com> References: <054F7DAA9E54D311AD090008C74CE9BD01766CC4@exchange.panasonicfa.com> <029901c03e0d$6bb058b0$0200000a@lan.diskiller.net>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Martin Minkus wrote: > > I subscribed to this list a few days ago, and after hearing nothing but > crickets (and the occasional NT server reboot far off in the distance) i > thought it was time to shake the stick, and see what response i can get ;) > Seems good so far :-) > > I have a Sun IPX, and Sun SparcServer 10 (both of which i picked up for free > recently). > > Okay. > > I believe the website (http://people.freebsd.org/~obrien/freebsd-sparc/) > shows there was a bias to simply develop for PCI based Ultra's (Sparc64 > port?), which i definately have no access to. (Unless i can steal one from > my university ;-) > > It appears there are several people with the older 32bit Sparcs on this > list, but they don't have any coding experience. I do, but only in > userspace, though i've been slowly trying to make my move up into the kernel > :) > > It appears there would have to be two seperate ports, FreeBSD/sparc, and > FreeBSD/sparc64, but only differing in the kernel, the userspace would be > the same? This appears to be what Linux (I just read the UltraLinux website) > have done, and so has Net and OpenBSD. > > I have little experience with the sparc architecture, so i'm unaware of the > differences (between Sparc and Sparc64), but if the two are vastly > different, we'll have two maintain two seperate porting efforts... (OpenBSD > has done this, but the Sparc64 port has lagged and/or is dead) > > The linux kernel also seems to do some funky shit like binary patch itself > on boot ... :/ Shit is right. Trust me, you can "binary patch" 32-bit SPARC instructions into 64-bit SPARC instructions. You're free to work on whatever you want, but the general consensus for all of us keepers of SPARC 1s, 2s, 5s, 10s, 20s, IPCs, and IPXs, was that it would be hard enough to get a port going for modern 64-bit machines, let alone doing it for ancient hardware, and NetBSD and OpenBSD support them quite adequately already. FWIW, FreeBSD isn't really interested in "hobby" ports anymore. -- "Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?" Wes Peters Softweyr LLC wes@softweyr.com http://softweyr.com/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-sparc" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?39F68D1C.45F9F336>