status of freebsd on ultrasparc?

[Reko Turja]

From: "Joachim Rosenfeld" <joerosenfeld at gmail.com>

> I'm a little confused about the status of FreeBSD on UltraSparc.
>
> This page says it is a fully supported Tier 1 platform:
>
>    http://www.freebsd.org/platforms/sparc.html
>

If you check the "Getting FreeBSD" page at project site, there is both 
6.x and 7.x available for ultrasparc - it has been Tier1 since 6.0 or 
so. I haven't run it on any "serious" hardware or in serious use. My 
one dedicated DNS and other diverse services ultra 10 box has served 
me flawlessly in lab though.

> I am considering running FreeBSD on a Sun Fire V210 UltaSparc 
> system. My
> whole reason for wanting to put FreeBSD on this box (which currently
> runs Solaris 10) is to run bind and build ports.

Quick check on sparc hardware notes:
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/7.0R/hardware.html#PROC-SPARC64
shows that the USIII family still isn't supported - I think the 
support is a work in progress, but somewhat hampered by the lack of 
documentation about the architecture?

> So I guess my question is this: (1) is FreeBSD an acceptable OS to 
> run on
> this Sun box and (2) will I have any major problems building ports?

Not yet at least. Running BIND shouldn't be a problem in the future - 
are you thinking about crosscompiling for intel/amd in the box or 
making UltraSparc builds?

-Reko