Re: Regarding older Sparc hardware (32-bit)
On Mon, 2009-05-04 at 19:52 +0000, brian m. carlson wrote:
> On Mon, May 04, 2009 at 01:37:46PM -0500, Dan Oglesby wrote:
> > Does Debian need/want more testers for older Sun systems like the IPC,
> > SPARCStation 1/2/5/20? I have a handful of older systems and a small
> > pile of SBus cards, all in working order, and didn't know if setting
> > these systems up for testing would be useful or not.
>
> As far as I'm aware, Debian does not support 32-bit SPARC system since
> lenny. Apparently, there is nobody working on the upstream kernel for
> 32-bit SPARC machines. It's also my understanding that jettisoning the
> 32-bit systems allows Debian to compile for SPARC v9 systems, which can
> provide significant performance benefits.
>
> So, probably not.
IIRC support was dropped because no one wanted to maintain them. At one
point there was an effort to provide packages for them; this may still
exist. If not, if the original poster wanted to set these machines up
and work on supporting them again I'm sure there would be greatful
users. I suspect it wouldn't be too much effort, esp. for the SPARC V8
based machines.
Cheers,
- Martin
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