From owner-freebsd-sparc Mon Dec 15 20:43:25 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) id UAA21254 for sparc-outgoing; Mon, 15 Dec 1997 20:43:25 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-sparc@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from mail.xmission.com (mail.xmission.com [198.60.22.22]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with SMTP id UAA21248 for ; Mon, 15 Dec 1997 20:43:17 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from softweyr@xmission.com) Received: from xmission.com [199.104.124.49] by mail.xmission.com with esmtp (Exim 1.73 #4) id 0xhoqg-0004YB-00; Mon, 15 Dec 1997 21:43:14 -0700 Message-ID: <3496086B.C932AF23@xmission.com> Date: Mon, 15 Dec 1997 21:49:47 -0700 From: Wes Peters Organization: Softweyr LLC X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.04 [en] (X11; I; FreeBSD 2.2.5-RELEASE i386) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Daniel Baker CC: Brian Handy , freebsd-sparc@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Freeloading FreeBSD for Free -- NOT! References: <199712160328.VAA20234@pluto.ops.NeoSoft.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-sparc@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org 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