[rescue] *BSD on Sparc?

[dave at cca.org]

jdboyd at cs.millersville.edu writes:

>> 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?

Did you mean to say "pre PowerPC"?

It's first generation POWER, with microchannel bus. The 930 
specificly is pretty rare, but smaller machines based around the 
same motherboard are more common. There's enough out there that
the lack of support from NetBSD or linux is actually kind of
surprising. They're *really* nice machines.

>> >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).

Definately.

>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?

It just seems really unlikely to actually happen. If it did,
it would be great.

------ David Fischer ------- dave at cca.org ------- http://www.cca.org -------
---------- "Anything Jesus can do, I can do better." - The Locust ----------