Sparc64 and FreeBSD 13.0

[John Baldwin]

On 12/4/19 7:58 PM, Mark Linimon wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 04, 2019 at 05:34:46PM -0600, Joe Kozak wrote:
>> I put my vote of support in for someone doing some updating if
>> possible.
> 
> Unfortunately it doesn't work like that in volunteer projects.
> 
> I estimate it would take 1-3 months to fix the toolchain -- which
> would only save us the existing systems (manufactured up to 2005).
> When I last looked at sun4v (the newer systems) I estimated 3-5
> months.
> 
> That's full-time activity from someone who *used* to do systems
> work, but has not for many years, and would have to come up to
> speed on 18 zillion things.
> 
> mcl
> 
> (fwiw I am a software engineer, ergo, my estimates suck.)

Fixing the toolchain is probably less than 1-3 months.

I have a freebsd-gcc9 port that I haven't posted for review yet, but
it hits the same snag (assertion failure in ld.bfd) that freebsd-gcc6
hits.  I think the assertion failure is wrong and needs to use >=
instead of >, but I just haven't sat down and looked at it in a
debugger to see the exact values at the time of the assertion failure.

However, I think even once you get it building there might be a few
more bumps with getting things like PCPU_* working in the kernel
correctly.  I probably won't get to it anytime soon, and sparc64
really needs multiple active folks to keep it viable.

-- 
John Baldwin