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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.wildstar.net!news.ececs.uc.edu!newsrelay.netins.net!news.dacom.co.kr!arclight.uoregon.edu!usenet.eel.ufl.edu!news.mathworks.com!hunter.premier.net!news1.erols.com!howland.erols.net!newsfeed.internetmci.com!news.webspan.net!usenet From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.org> Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Sparc port ???? Date: Sun, 15 Sep 1996 17:25:42 -0700 Organization: Walnut Creek CDROM Lines: 31 Message-ID: <323C9E86.2781E494@FreeBSD.org> References: <51hp44$mds@tilde.csc.ti.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: time.cdrom.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0 (X11; I; FreeBSD 2.2-CURRENT i386) To: Chris Barrera <cbarrera@socrates.msp.sc.ti.com> > > I keep hearing vague rumours that there is supposed to be a Sparc > port of FreeBSD or such. Unfortunately, neither Walnut Creek's nor > BSDI's web page have a spit of information that can be located. They > certainly don't seem to be advertising it in any place obvious. There was one and, when I last inquired over a year ago, it more or less ran multi-user. However, the real problem was that we didn't then (and don't now) really have any clear reason to support a SPARC port. Without a committment to making a truly *quality* SPARC port of FreeBSD, there's absolutely no point in doing it at all (for us, anyway). By "quality" I also mean a port which is easily installable from CDROM and other media, runs on a full range of Sun hardware (at least that which is considered currently "practical") and doesn't require a pre-existing copy of SunOS or Solaris for installation. Needless to say, we'd also want a full set of ports and packages for the SPARC. That's a lot of work and those committments are too important to us to skip, so we continue instead to concentrate for now on one or two platforms which give us the most bang for the buck. Right now we're only Intel, but were we to do another architecture port I don't think it would be for the SPARC architecture - it would be for the ALPHA. Of course, this is a volunteer project and if someone truly brilliant and motivated were to happen along, wishing for nothing more than to create a nifty plug-n-play SPARC port of FreeBSD, then you can bet I'd be reconsidering everything I just said above. -- - Jordan Hubbard President, FreeBSD Project