*BSD News Article 1771


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From: torek@horse.ee.lbl.gov (Chris Torek)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd,comp.os.mach
Subject: BSD on SPARC (was mach3.0 for Sun3's)
Message-ID: <24288@dog.ee.lbl.gov>
Date: 1 Jul 92 14:53:30 GMT
Article-I.D.: dog.24288
References: <1992Jun17.191451.6445@cis.ohio-state.edu> <17613@durer.cme.nist.gov>
Reply-To: torek@horse.ee.lbl.gov (Chris Torek)
Organization: Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Berkeley
Lines: 55
NNTP-Posting-Host: 128.3.112.15

(N.B.: I overrode the followup-to.  Among other things, I do not read
comp.os.mach [lately it has been hard even to reach comp.unix.bsd :-/ ]).

In article <17613@durer.cme.nist.gov> schnee@sail.ncsl.nist.gov
(Rick Schneeman) writes:
>Does anyone have the latest information about Chris Torek's
>work with porting BSD 4.4 to the Sun4 architecture?

I do. :-)

[Note: Sun and SPARC are trademarks of someone or another.  The rest of
this article is intended to scare away anyone not ready to deal with
alpha-quality software.]

SPARC support will be included on the 4.4BSD-alpha tape.  There will
probably be no SPARC binaries, however.  None of the SPARC-specific
code is proprietary, so the system will be exactly as AT&T-encumbered
as 4.4BSD-alpha.

The kernel is functional (or rather, was on Thursday and with any luck
will be again today), if utterly untuned and horribly slow.  We have no
boot code as yet, however, and therefore use the boot loaders that come
with SunOS.  There are still quite a few rough edges.  It has been run
on SPARCstation 1s, 1+s, 2s, SLCs, and IPCs.  As far as I know, it
should run on all SS1 and SS2 Sbus machines.  It will not run on the
old VME Sun-4s, nor on Mbus machines nor any SPARCs that use the
reference MMU.

The 4.4-alpha SPARC kernel contains limited SunOS compatibility code.
This is sufficient to run many Sun binaries, including MIT's X11,
provided that you copy your existing Sun dynamic-linker files from an
existing SunOS system.  (We use the Sun X11 binaries ourselves since we
have not yet had time to build `pure BSD' versions.)

Driver support is minimal.  The SCSI disk driver understands SunOS
labels, but is unable to create new ones, and currently does not
understand BSD labels.  (We plan to fix this by the time of the
official 4.4BSD release, but the details are still fuzzy.)  There is no
SCSI tape driver (yet).  The Lance ethernet driver runs (slowly).  We
do have a nice audio driver, thanks to Steve McCanne.  The built-in
serial ports work but are not well-tested, nor efficient.

Bootstrapping is a bit tricky, since you need a number of Sun files and
a Sun label.  You also need a working GNU C compiler, preferably
GCC-2.  We hope to have an installation document ready in time for the
alpha release, but make no promises.  Diskless NFS support is ``in the
works'' (we have a few machines running diskless, but only as a proof
of concept; to make it right we want our own boot loaders).

Please do not ask us for distributions, as we have neither the channels
nor the personnel to handle this.  Fortunately, UC Berkeley's CSRG do.
Buy their tapes, it will buy us more time to get everything in.  :-)
-- 
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Lawrence Berkeley Lab CSE/EE (+1 510 486 5427)
Berkeley, CA		Domain:	torek@ee.lbl.gov