[illumos-Discuss] SPARC

Wed Aug 18 16:52:26 PDT 2010

I agree with Garrett on "x86 first, then see what breaks on SPARC", at least 
while Illumos is young. The project is currently at a point where it needs 
to be usable on at least one architecture. Unfortunately, the resources to 
keep both in sync aren't yet there, I don't think. That means a decision 
needs to be made as to which gets priority. I think everyone will agree that 
x86 is the no-brainer answer.

That said, I have a vested interest in poking at SPARC support. 
Unfortunately, until x86 is "ready" for distro builders, it's too early to 
work on SPARC.

The silence ought not be read as lack of interest, but instead interest 
which isn't ready yet and is building up pressure. :)

--Matt

-- 
Matt Lewandowsky
Big Geek
Greenviolet
matt at greenviolet.net   http://www.greenviolet.net
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--------------------------------------------------
From: "Garrett D'Amore" <garrett at damore.org>
Date: Wednesday, 18 August, 2010 12:53
To: "Frank Middleton" <f.middleton at apogeect.com>
Cc: <discuss at lists.illumos.org>
Subject: Re: [illumos-Discuss] SPARC

> So basically someone just needs to take the effort to pull down the
> sources, try to build, and find out what (if anything) breaks.
>
> My biggest concern right now is that I haven't tested the SPARC build of
> my libc_i18n work, and I probably have screwed up the Makefiles
> (forgotten to list some sources).  That's super trivial to fix, once we
> bother to test it.  If you do the test now, then we can be done with
> it. ;-)
>
> I have an interest in SPARC, but I'm focused entirely on getting the
> critical x86 bits in first.  My sparc hardware hasn't been powered on in
> a while (its older stuff mostly... although I have an SB2500 I could set
> up), so it would take time to hook it up and start a build.  I just
> haven't taken the time.
>
> So, want to help out here?  Start doing a build, and fix the
> brokenness.... I know I have found at least one bug in the sparc libc
> Makefiles that I'm about to integrate a fix for.  There are probably
> others.
>
> As far as building a distro... until we have replacements or all the
> critical closed bits, its kind of a pointless effort.  That said, there
> are some folks working on it.  It will
>
> - Garrett
>
> On Wed, 2010-08-18 at 13:25 -0400, Frank Middleton wrote:
>> Just went through the entire discuss and developer mailman
>> archives, and there's nary a mention of SPARC. There's a whole
>> slew of SPARC users out there, stuck at b134, wondering what
>> to do. Sun, even before being acquired, wasn't really disposed
>> towards supporting older hardware and doubtless this hasn't
>> changed. As a /very/ long time Solaris user, I'm loth to switch
>> to BSD (or Linux, where my experience hasn't been that great).
>>
>> Alan Coopersmith was kind enough to take the time to make the
>> XSun sources available and I've been busy coming up with a
>> strategy to get it to build without encumbered code. However,
>> once this is done, it looks like there might not be an OS to run
>> it on.
>>
>> Would it be true that there's no one active at Illumos who has
>> any interest in SPARC? I see Martin Bochnig is active on these
>> lists, so there's probably at least one. I'd be only happy to dive in
>> and try what ironically may be a port /to/ SPARC when the appropriate
>> time comes. It may be too early to ask some of these questions, but:
>>
>> o Is Illumos interested at all in directly or indirectly supporting
>>      a SPARC distribution? Currently Martux is the only OSol distro
>>      for SPARC and IIRC it relies heavily on BSD and hasn't been updated
>>      in quite a while. I believe it also depends on encumbered code. I
>>      have no idea if Martin has any plans to revive Martux using the
>>      Illumos code base, but if he does, and needs some help...
>>
>> o Using GCC for kernel building on SPARC has been spotty. If
>>     Illumos plans to migrate away from Sun Studio, this could have
>>     a significant impact on maintaining SPARC support. Not sure
>>     how to mitigate this other than actually building a SPARC distro.
>>
>> o  Do you need help testing things like the ports of sed and iconv
>>      on SPARC? I'm kinda busy with the XSun thing, but keeping
>>      the SPARC alive might need to be ongoing...
>>
>> o I subscribed to announce, discuss, and developer. Presumably one
>>     or more of those lists will indicate when the time has come to
>>     actually try to build a distribution - my guess is that that time
>>     may be a little way off.  Is there a hoped-for date?
>>
>> Thanks -- Frank
>>
>>
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