Re: running Debian on sun4c
On Mon, 2005-05-16 at 15:12, Jeremie Koenig wrote:
> If I understand correctly, sun4c is not supported by Debian because it
> lacks instrictions that speed everything else up.
It doesn't have unsigned multiply and unsigned divide IIRC. There are
work arounds for this but they are a big performance hit if you're on an
architecture that can do them. Given how old most sun4c machines are
the decision was made to drop support as it would increase over all
happiness. Well that's what I /think/ the reasons are.
> Now, I'd really like
> to run Debian on this old SPARCstation IPX I just got, to be able to use
> this gigantic screen and very very cool keyboard I got along with it :-)
Depending on the exact spec of both may I suggest investing in an Ultra
1 (Ultra 2's are another popular choice), you may find that all of the
relevant parts can be moved to it. When I checked there was one on
ebay.co.uk for 5 UKP with no bids. This will perform significant better
than an IPX and you may find the cost / time trade off on getting the
IPX working is worth it alone. YMMV.
> Now, it seems the only way would be recompiling every package I need
> with the appropriate gcc options. Fortunately, I also own a
> SPARCstation 10 (which is serial-console only, unfortunately), which
> could do the job.
It could but what you're suggesting is no small undertaking. I would
guess you might be talking weeks to build a complete working system.
You might be better off finding out what the differences are and then
scanning the binary for the offending instructions and only recompiling
when you find them.
> So, is there any hope, in your opinion ?
Yes, it just depends on how much time you're willing to spend on it.
The quick options is using Potatoe (2.2) with the obvious caveats about
security. After that comes things like NetBSD or Gentoo (although see
comment about compute time - distcc might help a little, as might a
cross compiler on a faster machine). The most time consuming option
(IMHO) would be to start a package archive for sun4c, after locating the
appropriate packages that need recompiling and rebuilding them setting
up the archive shouldn't be too difficult. If you go that route I'm
sure there would be otheres who would be interested / greatful.
> Also, it's still unclear to me what kernel versions/debian packages are
> supposed to support sun4c (both the 2.4 and 2.6 d-i kernels fail to
> boot, although not at the same point.) Does anyone know this ?
2.2 should work. As I understand it support for sparc-32 in 2.6 kernels
is still in need so of a bit of work and some of the 2.4 series are also
broken. If you have the time I'm sure the maintainers would appreciate
patches to repair support for sun4c.
HTH
Cheers,
- Martin
--
Martin
inkubus@interalpha.co.uk
"Seasons change, things come to pass"
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