[rescue] *BSD on Sparc?

[Joshua D Boyd]

I've taken the liberty of rearranging Dave's points into the order
that I want ot address theme.

On Sat, Aug 03, 2002 at 08:30:32PM -0400, dave at cca.org wrote:
> >> NetBSD runs on anything, so you could also run that. But I haven't tried 
> >> it personally.

> >Come to think of it, I've never heard of a NetBSD port to the J90 or
> >EL line of machines from Cray either.  It seems there is a little bit
> >of work on it from S/390 machines though.
> 
> Again, what's the point? No one is going to get gcc anywhere
> close to the level of the Cray compilers. (Ok, mildly a point 
> there, just because it can be really hard to get a copy of UNICOS.)

I didn't say there was a good point to putting NetBSD on Crays
(although if someone did, then maybe other people would enjoy trying
to write a better compiler).  Just that the fact that there was no
NetBSD/Cray port indicates that what Shawn said was technically
inaccurate.  This is the mailing list where people are in pedant mode
24/7 after alll.
 
> I don't want to criticize the NetBSD project, because they've done
> wonders, both in supporting lots of exotic hardware and also in
> continuing a sane evolution of BSD, but I am in an unfortunate
> position of having a couple of systems they don't support. Primarily
> my RS/6000 (Powerserver 930). (Which I'm almost done replacing with
> a Sun-4/3x0, even though that's a lot slower, just because I hate
> AIX so much.)

What is the Powerserver 930 exactly?  Was it common?  I'm guessing it
is pre Power series and based on the original RS/6000 chipset, right?
Has there been any NetBSD and/or GCC work for that chipset?

> >That is not try.  I have yet to see NetBSD running on an Onyx,
> >Challenge, Octane, or Indigo2, or even a lowly Indigo.
> 
> It'll never support the graphics hardware, so what's the point?
> (Unless you just mean a headless SMP SGI box as a compute server.
> That would be nice running NetBSD.)

Headless SMP is more than a good enough reason for porting to the Onyx
and Challange (since they are the same except for the graphics, and
both would make a nice compute server, once SMP support is ready).

But further, if someone were to keep up the momentum after documenting
the basic hardware, scsi subsystems, and so on, then why not continue
on and reverse engineer the Xserver?

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd