Re: Sparc status ?

Yeah, I understand why you would believe that. I'm not blaming you, I just want to let everyone know the sentence "32-bit code generation as we use it is no longer supported upstream" is incorrect. You can see on the GCC 4.7 [1] and 4.8 [2] changes list that removing any SPARC code generation features is NOT mentioned. In fact, the only SPARC related change was GCC 4.7 dropping Solaris 8, which has been EOL for a long time.

There is no need to switch to a 64-bit userland. I can already build both 32-bit and 64-bit apps on my system, right now.

[1] http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.7/changes.html

[2] http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.8/changes.html

On Fri, Apr 18, 2014 at 11:35 AM, Sébastien Bernard <sbernard@nerim.net> wrote:

Le 18/04/2014 14:16, Patrick Baggett a écrit :

I really don't understand why this "32-bit gone" myth is happening. It was poor wording at least. Debian doesn't even support the ancient 32-bit sparc CPUs. Modern SPARC ABIs (post 1997) require 64-bit CPUs even when running in 32-bit code, it's like x32 ABI in x86 land.

SPARCv7, SPARCv8 = old 32-bit CPUs, Linux kernel barely supports them now

SPARCv9 = modern (post 1997) 64-bit CPUs, Linux and GCC supports them just fine.

And just so we can finally kill this rumor dead:

http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.8.2/gcc/SPARC-Options.html#SPARC-Options

GCC still supports the 32-bit ABI:

With -mv8plus, GCC generates code for the SPARC-V8+ ABI. The difference from the V8 ABI is that the global and out registers are considered 64 bits wide. This is enabled by default on Solaris in 32-bit mode for all SPARC-V9 processors.

So no, you don't need to rebuild everything as 64-bit binaries, or should I say, rebuild under LP64 model. That wouldn't even make sense and would hurt performance. Please refer anyone who believes this to this message.

Patrick

So, if I have understood correctly, the main problem is that 32bit compilation is not supported in the current releases of gcc ?
Going to 64bit userland is a huge leap forward.
For the second one, I wonder. I've been able to run 3.13 kernel on my V240 hardware and I thing it's recent enough.
I have no clue why is it marked oldkernel something related to the buildd ?

Seb

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Maybe it was poor understanding by my side. I read the https://release.debian.org/jessie/arch_qualify.html and at the bottom line, there is this mention of this :

> sparc

> Upstream Support

> According to the gcc maintainer 32bit code generation as we use it is no longer supported upstream and we should aim for > a switch to 64bit userland anytime soon.
This is quite clear, and maybe plain wrong according to you.
This seems to prevent switch from gcc 4.6 to gcc 4.8.

Seb