Re: M4000 failing to boot Debian Sparc64

[Dennis Clarke <dclarke@blastwave.org>]

On 7/2/23 17:19, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> Hi Dennis!

Good day to you Sir!

> On Sun, 2023-07-02 at 14:34 -0400, Dennis Clarke wrote:
> > You are likely kicking a dead horse. That M4000 is similar to my M3000
> > and you will never ever get Linux to run there. Ever. Unless you have a
> > few million dollars for research and development and then be able to
> > push all the good research upstream into the Linux kernel.
>
> 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.

> 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.

--
Dennis Clarke
RISC-V/SPARC/PPC/ARM/CISC