future of sparc64

[Kurt Lidl]

On 10/7/17 1:41 PM, Mark Linimon wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 05, 2017 at 07:12:28PM -0500, A. Wilcox wrote:
>> That doesn't change the fact that sparc64 still exists, and with Oracle
>> laying off Solaris as well, FreeBSD becomes a "way out" for people
>> heavily invested (DC full of sparc64 gear, or such).
> 
> I have thought for some time that we've been a "way out" for Solaris
> sites wanting to keep ZFS and not deal with licensing issues, and have
> worked to keep sparc64 alive.  (AFAIK FreeBSD is the only open source
> sparc64/zfs solution?)
> 
> But here's the current problem.
> 
> All gccs > 4.9 fail to build.  Looking at the logs AFAICT the failure
> is a floating-point exception as soon as the first built binary is run
> during the internal testing.

I built gcc 6.0.4 (natively) on a sparc64 stable/11 a week ago.

I built the stable/11 kernel with that compiler (it required a one-line
change to the kernel sources), and have been running that on my sparc64
stable/11 gateway since I got it compiled.

The pkg'd binary for gcc 6.0.4 is here:

http://pkg.pix.net/FreeBSD:11:sparc64/gcc6-6.4.0_1.txz

-Kurt