Sparc64 doesn't care about you, and you shouldn't care about Sparc64

Michelle Sullivan michelle at sorbs.net
Sun Nov 8 18:43:41 UTC 2015


Sean Bruno wrote:
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> On 11/06/15 01:18, alexmcwhirter at triadic.us wrote:
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>> So is the problem in question the lack of being able to use
>> clang/llvm? Or that newer hardware is unsupported? sparc64 supports
>> sun4u which is most boxes, Fujitsu Sparc64 boxes also work quite
>> well. The only thing really missing is sun4v and a few drivers here
>> and there. OpenBSD has support for almost all of the newer
>> Sun/Oracle boxes, which shouldn't bee too hard to port over.
>>
>> http://www.openbsd.org/sparc64.html
>>
>> Because of the lack of sun4v support i have moved over to a custom 
>> illumos distro, but one of the things im working on there is to
>> replace gcc with clang/llvm. If it means saving the sparc64 port i
>> will gladly move some of my work over to freebsd.
>>     
>
> problem 1.  the base clang/llvm doesn't support the FreeBSD sparc64
> target.  This needs work, and hey, if someone wants to spend the time
> to get things working, great.  Let's move on it and modernize the target.
>
> problem 2.  lack of development hardware in the FreeBSD project.  I'm
> not asking for people to buy the FreeBSD project 10-15 year old sparc
> hardware and send it to us.  We don't want it.  If there is a push to
> modernize support for Sparc machines, we can talk about aquiring new
> machines and racking them up as reference boxes.  If there are people
> interested in modernizing CPU support, by all means, move forward and
> do it.  Don't let me stop you.
>   
I would like to see it continue on sun4u, as I still have a load of sun4u boxes - quite capable boxes - and some that people can develop on if you want (I cannot code myself on Sun except for generic stuff in C so I'd not be much help on that front.)

Michelle 

-- 
Michelle Sullivan
http://www.mhix.org/



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