Re: [RFC PATCH 0/13] sparc32: sunset sun4m and sun4d

[Romain Dolbeau <romain@dolbeau.org>]

Le dim. 20 déc. 2020 à 09:54, Julian Calaby <julian.calaby@gmail.com> a écrit :
> If I want to run them, assuming the hardware still works, I need to
> netboot them as I cannot find working, compatible HDDs for them as
> everything has switched to SATA or SAS.

SCSI2SD (<http://www.codesrc.com/mediawiki/index.php/SCSI2SD>)
are a bit expensive, but solve that problem (I own both a V5 and a V6,
both work well in my SPARCstations, tried sun4c and sun4m).
As it takes micro-sd cards, it's quite easy to keep multiple OSes
on hand.

> Then there's the issue of finding a monitor as they're not
> electrically compatible with VGA

Huh? There is Sun's 13W3-to-vga adapters and cables, and many
monitors will sync to Sun's frequency (though not the most recent
LCDs whose analog circuitry is pathetic compared to old-school
CRTs). Some framebuffers will output 1280x1024 (rarer than for
1152x900), and some can be coerced to do almost anything with
some Forth knowledge (see e.g.
<https://github.com/rdolbeau/SunTurboGX>, again blowing my
own horn here sorry...).

> (...) booting one up for fun is simply impractical

An SCSI2SD and either a null-modem serial cable or a
Sun keyboard/13w3 cable/17"LCD combo and you're good to
go. You might need another unix-like box to netboot the system.

> I believe that Gentoo is architecture-neutral enough that it'd work,
> but I believe that you'll have to compile everything - there'll be no
> pre-built anything for sparc32

Trying gentoo is on my todo list... has been for a long time :-(

> and as it's fairly slow hardware by
> today's standards, that's going to take a long time, however you could
> probably use distcc and cross-compilers to speed it up.

Isn't that what Qemu is for ? :-) I've managed to recompile LLVM
and clang in NetBSD 9 for my SS20, one by cross-compiling
(LLVM requires too much memory), the other in QEmu.
Unfortunately, Qemu doesn't yet support mt-tcg (multithreaded
emulation) for sparc so single-core only - still faster than the HW,
mostly because of incomparably faster I/O.

> If there were more people using it or more testing, or more distros
> supporting it - not just (theoretically?) working on it - then I'd be
> fighting to keep it.

I wish I had some arguments for that point... I will just re-mention Qemu,
as it makes testing quite easy and reasonably not-too-slow.

Cordially,

-- 
Romain Dolbeau