[rescue] *BSD on Sparc?

[Dave McGuire]

On August 3, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> 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.

  Sridhar has done some NetBSD S/390 work but he hasn't touched it in
months.

  A NetBSD port to the J90 or EL machines would actually be the same
port...they're both YMP-architecture machines and are binary
compatible.  Other YMP machines include the YMP2, YMP4, YMP/C90,
YMP/M90, and T90.  The YMP was a followon to the X/MP architecture,
and if memory serves most of the design was done by Steve Chen at
Cray.

  A Cray (X/MP, YMP, or otherwise) NetBSD port is highly unlikely due to
hardware complexity and lack of available documentation.  For many
reasons it is my opinion that these systems should be viewed as
"black-box appliances to crunch numbers", rather than "yet another
computer to run NetBSD on".  Unicos is a good, solid OS and the
compiler technology absolutely can't be beat.

         -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire                     "I haven't worn pants in 14 months!"
St. Petersburg, FL                                   -Pete Wargo