[SunRescue] Sun3/4/4c/4m - I'm confused!

[Dave McGuire]

On Fri, 20 Aug 1999, David Cantrell wrote:
>Can someone enlighten me as to what models fall into the categories of 
>Sun3, Sun4, Sun4c, Sun4m and so on?  For instance, what is my 
>Sparcstation 2?

  The top-level categories of Sun machines are Sun 1, Sun 2, Sun 3, and Sun 4. 
For the sake of brevity I'll restrict this to sun3 and sun4.

  The basic categories ("architectures") are divded into "kernel
architectures".  All sun3 processors except the sun3/400 and the sun3/80 are
kernel architecture "sun3", while the 3/400 and 3/80, being 68030 (not 68020)
based, are kernel architecture "sun3x".

  The sun4 architecture is divided into many different kernel architectures. 
I may be missing a few, but the important ones are sun4, sun4c, sun4m, sun4d,
and sun4u.  To categorize the most common machines:

  sun4
    sun4/100, sun4/200, sun4/300, sun4/400

  sun4c
    sparc1, sparc1+, sparc2, IPC, IPX, ELC

  sun4m
    sun4/600, ss4, ss5, ss10, ss20, classic, LX

  sun4u
    UltraSPARC machines

  Under Sun operating systems, usually machines of the same base
architecture but different kernel architectures can run the same userland
binaries, but require different bootblocks and different kernels.  More modern
OSs like NetBSD (and probably Linux, not sure) have merged support for these
different kinds of machines such that the same bootblocks, kernels, and
userland binaries can be used from kernel architecture to kernel
architecture...enabling us to move system disks from machine to machine without
having to jump through hoops.

  The main difference between the kernel architectures are the details of the
operation of the MMU.


              -Dave McGuire