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Xref: sserve comp.unix.bsd:1804 comp.os.mach:1799 Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!agate!dog.ee.lbl.gov!horse.ee.lbl.gov!torek 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