[rescue] Subject: Re: Sun SparcStation 20

Meelis Roos mroos at linux.ee
Tue Jun 21 15:09:41 CDT 2016


> Just be aware that OpenBSD doesn't support SMP on 32bit Sparc (yet maybe
> someday if someone is feeling adventurous!)
> NetBSD does support SMP on this hardware as does Linux although you'll have a
> hard time building kernels small enough to boot above about Linux 3.4ish. It
> might be possible to get LTO working on Sparc kernel builds to reduce the size
> to manageable levels again but I don't think anyone has tried yet. NetBSD also
> tends to have better graphics support due to macallan's efforts.

Current sparclinux on 32-bit sparc is not something I would recommend 
for practical use. First, 32-bit support was dropped by the distros some 
time ago, and then sparc was dropped from most linux distros. Gentoo 
sparc, debian-ports sparc64 and oracles rpm-based reference sparc linux 
distro are alive for 64-bit sparc. In theory, gentoo could work on 
32-bit but I expect there to be more issues than kernel size - it's 
basically unmaintained.

-- 
Meelis Roos (mroos at linux.ee)


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