Chris Newport wrote:
BERTRAND Joël wrote:andrew holway wrote:just thinkin, I don't think a sparc32 chip has been released in more than 12 years. Surely these cannot be energy efficient machines ;)And LEON processor ? A sparc V8 that can be written in a FPGA ? It runs with Linux. Berkeley university has a work in progress on a super computer that uses sparc32 too.Why does a Linux distribution need the latest bleeding edge kernel ? With no new hardware to support it should be easy to put together a distribution with the last known good kernel and the latest applications.
The main trouble is there is no good kernel since 2.2 release. I use a lot of sparc32 hardware and : - 2.4 randomly crashes with "watchdog reset" OBP message (on all SS20 I use) ; - 2.6 is more stable, but only UP. SMP spinlock are broken (and I'm looking for volunteers to help me) ; - HyperSPARC support is broken or not usable (I have tried to boot a 2.4.32 with 4*RT626...) on 2.4 _and_ 2.6.
That being said, if we work on a distribution with the last known good kernel, we can immediatly drop this distribution. To be alive, kernel has to be alive !
JKB