Hello!
On Mon, 2023-07-03 at 05:28 -0400, Dennis Clarke wrote:
I don't think that's true. Since it has been reported that these machines
run OpenBSD, it should be a matter of reading the OpenBSD kernel sources
and add the missing bits and pieces for the SPARC64 VII(+) machines to the
Linux kernel.
Are we certain about NetBSD or OpenBSD? I did try to install NetBSD and
that failed also. I think I have my notes on that somewhere but it would
be easy enough for me to try again.
OpenBSD lists the M4000 as supported:
https://www.openbsd.org/sparc64.html
While I didn't actually mention NetBSD here, since it's not the same as OpenBSD,
I checked that as well now and it currently doesn't support Fujitsu CPUs, but
that's work-in-progress, same applies to sun4v, i.e. T1-T5. For sun4v, I'm actually
in contact with the developer doing the work.
https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/sparc64/
I don't think that would be much as this it just some board-specific code
and it wouldn't probably take an experienced kernel developer longer than
a month if at all.
That brings the costs down to the level of reasonable. Let me ponder
that a while.
Find someone on the sparclinux Linux kernel mailing list willing to do the work
and create a Bountysource campaign to sponsor the work. I assume, you can get
it done for maybe $5000-$10.000.
Adrian