Re: Creation of Sparc (32-bit) port.

[Aurelien Jarno <aurelien@aurel32.net>]

Chris Andrew a écrit :
> All,
> 
> It seems that people are very keen to see 32 bit support die.  Who do
> I have to contact to get a separate 32 bit sparc port set-up?  As
> suggested before, we can give the new port 6 months, and see what
> happens?  At the moment, 32 bit future is not looking good, at least
> let's go out trying!
> 

This has already been said a dozen of time, but it looks like some
people do not understand. Let's try a last time.

Creating a 32-bit sparc repository won't help. We already know that the
32-bit sparc userland, is working correctly (apart for a dozen of
packages, but that's fixable), as the *current* Debian sparc port has a
*32-bit userland*.

The problem is that the 32-bit sparc kernel is not maintained and starts
to not work correctly. There are huge differences in the privileged mode
of sparc v8 and sparc v9, on the instructions, but mainly on the other
parts of the CPU, like the MMU, SMP support or exception handling.
That's why you can't use a 32-bit kernel on a 64-bit sparc, whereas most
other 32-/64-bit architectures support that.

-- 
  .''`.  Aurelien Jarno	            | GPG: 1024D/F1BCDB73
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