Date: Mon, 15 Dec 1997 21:49:47 -0700 From: Wes Peters <softweyr@xmission.com> To: Daniel Baker <dbaker@pluto.ops.NeoSoft.com> Cc: Brian Handy <handy@sag.space.lockheed.com>, freebsd-sparc@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Freeloading FreeBSD for Free -- NOT! Message-ID: <3496086B.C932AF23@xmission.com> References: <199712160328.VAA20234@pluto.ops.NeoSoft.com>
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Daniel Baker wrote:
> > 1. "I've got this great [IPX|IPC|SS2|your old dead slow Sun here] that
> > I want to put FreeBSD on. What's supported?"
> >
> >
> > Answer: The first machines out of the gate are going to be the
> > sorta-high-end Ultrasparcs which are expected to drop in price to be
> > competetive with the x86 architecture within the next year. Non-ultra
> > platforms will follow later, based most likely on popularity and the
> > assistance of the interested user base.
>
> I think the majority of users that will run FreeBSD on their sparc
> will _not_ be the users with the higher end boxes, but more likely the
> old kludges everyone has lying around doing nothing. I think IPX's,
> SS2s, SS5s, etc should be the FIRST supported.
Agreed.
As someone pointed out before, there is going to be an education curve
for those who are interested in this as well. Let me be the first to
state here that if you want to be involved in this project, you're going
to have to learn a little about the various Sun architecture families,
and which of them have been cloned.
What Daniel was trying to point out above is that the most common
architectures amongst the user base are going to be sun4c and sun4m.
sun4c = SS 1, 1+, 2, IPC, IPX, SLC, and ELC. sun4m = SPARC Classic,
SS LX, 4, 5, 10, & 20. In general, models of a particular architecture
have similar system capabilities with different models of SPARC cpu.
Since OpenBSD has support for these architectures, getting FreeBSD
to run on them (given a functioning SPARC kernel) shouldn't be a
mystery, just a bit of hard work.
--
"Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?"
Wes Peters Softweyr LLC
http://www.xmission.com/~softweyr softweyr@xmission.com
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