Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 07:32:09 -0500 (EST) From: Lyndon Griffin <lgriffin@bsd4us.org> To: freebsd-sparc@freebsd.org Subject: hello ello llo lo o Message-ID: <200001181232.HAA13329@bsd4us.org>
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Breaking the silence is a tough thing to do. My roommie and I have kinda
sorta adopted the port to the 32bit SPARC architectures. We consider
ourselves in the research phase of this little endeavour. I'll do
a quick dump of our status, and then ask a few questions (is there anyone
even here?).
We have, to date,the following hardware fully available for development
and testing:
(1) SPARCstation 5, 32mb RAM, one 85mhz CPU
(1) SPARCstation 10, 80mb RAM, one 60mhz CPU
(1) SPARCstation 2, 64mb RAM, one 40mhz CPU
(1) SPARCstation 330, 40mb RAM, one 25mhz CPU
(1) SPARCserver 470, 128mb ECC RAM, one 33mhz CPU
a plethora of keyboards and mice, including type-4 kb & opt. mice, type-5
kbs of multiple layouts, type-5 opt. and mech. mice, and a single type-6
kb and crossbow mech mouse. The 2, 5, and 10 all have cgsix fbs. The 330
has a p4-cgsix and a p4-bwtwo. The 470 has no fb (currently). I have a
pair of sm71 cpus en route for the SS10. There is also, for what it's worth,
a pair of B&W 20" (or is it 19") tubes, and a pair of 17" trinitrons.
Wh
book called "SPARC Architecture, Assembly Language Programming, and C,"
by a guy surnamed Paul. We also have D&I of BSD4.4 (a great book, I
recommend it for everyone interested in BSD).
We have absolutely no clue what to do next. We both lean towards OpenBSD
as an alternate OS. The 2, 5, and 330 are all running 2.5 or 2.6. The 10
has Sol7 on it, and I plan to dual-boot it to 2.3, as well, so I can get
an OS on the 470 (nobody but Sun has an OS that will run on it, right now,
because apparently nobody knows anything about the 470 mmu). Wait - that's
confusing... the 2, 5, and 330 are running OpenBSD. The 10 (And hopefully
soon, the 470) is running Solaris. If it matters, I lean towards OpenBSD
because early on in my SPARC life, the NetBSD crowd was very rude to me,
while Theo De Raadt (sp?) kinda showed me the ropes - this was in reference
to me trying like hell to get the 330 netbooted into the first OS I could.
ANYWAYS... My first question is about the "early boot code" on the site:
How far along is this code - will it actually boot a machine? And, what
is the possibility that we can reverse-engineer that code into something
that will run on a sun4(|c|m)? Would it be smarter to start from the
4.4-BSDlite2 code and work that up to -current? Or should we work from
something a little more contemporary, like Open-, Net-, or (shudder) the
Linux kernel sources? Has anyone yet taken responsibility as a leader
in the SPARC porting efforts? Has anyone besides Jason Evans written any
code for this port?
Next battery: has anyone successfully built and tested a cross-compiler
for this effort? I mean, besides the information in the FAQ - it sounds
as though Jason has/had a cygnus setup. Would it be beneficial if I used
my site as a general knowledge collection area and possibly a CVS server
for the project (that's what I have planned it for, anyways)?
I'm extremelly anxious to get moving with this, but I don't want to be
the proverbial headless chicken. (damn, I hate mailx - look, another typo).
<:) Lyndon
(http://www.bsd4us.org/)
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