From owner-freebsd-sparc  Wed Oct 25 10:20:49 2000
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Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2000 10:20:41 -0700 (PDT)
From: Matthew Jacob <mjacob@feral.com>
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To: bpechter@shell.monmouth.com
Cc: freebsd-sparc@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: Sparc port going 64 bit
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> On Wed, Oct 25, 2000 at 08:40:02AM -0400, Bill Pechter wrote:
> > Wes Peters  (wes@softweyr.com) wrote:
> > > 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.
> > 
> > This is why there ain't gonna be an Ultra Port for a while. 
> > Most of the folks who will volunteer to work on the stuff don't have or
> > want to purchase Ultras...
> 

Not sure I agree with this. Let NetBSD keep doing the excellent job it does do
on all the different platforms it supports- including 32 bit sparc. It's also
doing a good, but slow, job of getting to sparc64 (and doing it right).

FreeBSD has different markets/customers, though, and the ones for Sparc don't
give a hoot about 32 bit sparc. 

David has offered a U1 for folks wanting to work on this. Frankly, this is
helpful, but a tougher call- we'd have to support SBus right away, and,
frankly, I'd also like to avoid that as well- so the first model supported is
likely to be U10/PCI (Simba chipset) with U30/60 being a close followon
(Psycho).

All of this will have to be (officially) reverse engineered from Linux &&
NetBSD-sparc64 implementations as the doc sets are a bit hard to find and/or
sparse (especially wrt chip *and* OBP errata).

-matt




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