[rescue] FreeBSD SPARC

[Michael Parson]

On Mon, Sep 19, 2005 at 10:44:36AM -0500, Brian Dunbar wrote:
> On Sep 19, 2005, at 10:33 AM, Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
>> Brian Dunbar wrote:
>>
>>> Query - what's the current status of the SPARC port of FreeBSD - will
>>> it stand up as a production OS?
>>>
>>> All I want out of it is a customer facing web server, nothing fancy
>>> and certainly no X.
>>>
>>> Yes, I know - put the OS ON a box that was designed FOR the box.  I
>>> have my reasons, but comments welcome.
>>>
>>
>> Why not NetBSD?
>
> I've never used it, so failed to consider it.  Which isn't a good  
> reason at all, I know.
>
> Net is 'better' on the SPARC than Free, then?

'better' is subjective, in many ways.  Up until recently, NetBSD/sparc64
had a couple of minor bugs, but they seem to have all been ironed out
as of 2.0.2.  With either OS, you're going to run into the standard
problems 64 platforms have with non-64 bit clean source code, but most
of the stuff you'd run on a server tend to be OK.  One of the early
work-arounds that the NetBSD people would do was run the 64 bit kernel
with the NetBSD/sparc (32bit) userland, which minimized such exposure,
and in some cases, ran faster.

I'm running NetBSD/sparc64 2.0.2 on my Blade 1000 at home.  I just need
to spend another couple hours on it so I can make it my 'production' box
at home and retire my last Linux box.

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson at bl.org