From owner-freebsd-sparc64@FreeBSD.ORG Tue Oct 14 20:13:28 2008 Return-Path: Delivered-To: sparc64@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5E231106568E for ; Tue, 14 Oct 2008 20:13:28 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from marius@alchemy.franken.de) Received: from alchemy.franken.de (alchemy.franken.de [194.94.249.214]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E949C8FC23 for ; Tue, 14 Oct 2008 20:13:27 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from marius@alchemy.franken.de) Received: from alchemy.franken.de (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by alchemy.franken.de (8.14.3/8.14.3/ALCHEMY.FRANKEN.DE) with ESMTP id m9EJvVdA078142 for ; Tue, 14 Oct 2008 21:57:31 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from marius@alchemy.franken.de) Received: (from marius@localhost) by alchemy.franken.de (8.14.3/8.14.3/Submit) id m9EJvVbf078141 for sparc64@freebsd.org; Tue, 14 Oct 2008 21:57:31 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from marius) Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2008 21:57:30 +0200 From: Marius Strobl To: sparc64@freebsd.org Message-ID: <20081014195730.GA77737@alchemy.franken.de> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.2.3i Cc: Subject: USIII support X-BeenThere: freebsd-sparc64@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Porting FreeBSD to the Sparc List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2008 20:13:28 -0000 FYI, HEAD now has basic support for sun4u-machines based on USIII and beyond. If you want to give it a try there's a install image snapshot (built with neither docs nor ports) available at: http://people.freebsd.org/~marius/8.0-20081011-SNAP-sparc64-disc1.iso.gz Known working machines so far are: Blade 1000, Blade 1500, Blade 2000, Fire V210, Fire 280R and Netra 20/Netra T4 though machines similar to these like Fire V240 probably will also just work with all essential on-board devices being supported. AFAICT stability is en par with that on USII-based machines (i.e. it crashed neither during lots of compilations nor heavy network load for me). Caveats: o Besides serial devices, only those supported by creator(4) are currently usable as console, i.e. not even machfb(4) works at this point (it'll trigger a RED state exception, which shouldn't be that hard to fix though), let alone XVR cards. o It's not clear whether all endian-bugs in mpt(4) (such controllers are found on-board in f.e. Fire V440) are fixed, yet. It works just fine with an SAS add-on card for me though. o There's no driver for the Sun Cassini/NS Saturn Gigabit NICs found on-board (again f.e. Fire V440) and as add-on cards so far. o There's no driver for controlling the fans in machines based on the Excalibur board, yet. This means that Blade 1000/2000 aren't very useable as workstations so far due to the noise caused by the fans permanently running at full speed. o There's no support for host-to-PCI-Express or host-to-PCI-X bridges so far due to lack of access to such machines (adding support for the XMITS PCI-X bridges to the existing schizo(4) should be rather straightforward, PCI-Express will require a new driver and probably some additional tweaking though). Marius