Mailing List Archive

Reviving the SPARC port a bit...
The sparc port seems to be aging, in particular the installation ISO and
stage 3 archives. I'd like to propose a few things and get some opinions.

1. We need new stage 3 libraries and installation ISO's. That's probably
a given.

2. We need a stage 3 with a 64bit userland. Thanks to Oracle, we now
have kernel / driver support for many newer sparc boxes that can utilize
large amounts of ram and don't see much of a performance reduction by
running 64bit code. I don't think killing the 32bit userland single-lib
archive is a good idea as some people probably see much better
performance on older boxes. However, we could set the multilib profile
to default to 64bit with 32bit backwards compatibility. We could also
just make new stage 3 profile / profiles.

3. Maybe we should consider finalizing the multilib profile, and make it
look more like the x86 profile as far as functionality is concerned.

I figure there aren't a lot of people around here, but i am willing to
start doing all of this by myself. Who knows, maybe we can attract a few
more developers if the port gets a bit more aligned with the rest of
gentoo. I have quite a few machines at my disposal. A few V215's,
T1000's, M4000's, T5120's, Netra X1's, and probably a few more that i
can't think of at the moment. I plan on setting myself up a few build
servers, anyone else who wants to help is welcome to an account on them.
Re: Reviving the SPARC port a bit... [ In reply to ]
On 01/09/2016 03:34 AM, Alex McWhirter wrote:
> The sparc port seems to be aging, in particular the installation ISO and
> stage 3 archives. I'd like to propose a few things and get some opinions.
>
> 1. We need new stage 3 libraries and installation ISO's. That's probably
> a given.
>
> 2. We need a stage 3 with a 64bit userland. Thanks to Oracle, we now
> have kernel / driver support for many newer sparc boxes that can utilize
> large amounts of ram and don't see much of a performance reduction by
> running 64bit code. I don't think killing the 32bit userland single-lib
> archive is a good idea as some people probably see much better
> performance on older boxes. However, we could set the multilib profile
> to default to 64bit with 32bit backwards compatibility. We could also
> just make new stage 3 profile / profiles.
>
> 3. Maybe we should consider finalizing the multilib profile, and make it
> look more like the x86 profile as far as functionality is concerned.
>
> I figure there aren't a lot of people around here, but i am willing to
> start doing all of this by myself. Who knows, maybe we can attract a few
> more developers if the port gets a bit more aligned with the rest of
> gentoo. I have quite a few machines at my disposal. A few V215's,
> T1000's, M4000's, T5120's, Netra X1's, and probably a few more that i
> can't think of at the moment. I plan on setting myself up a few build
> servers, anyone else who wants to help is welcome to an account on them.
>
>
New installation ISO's sounds like a plan, when I installed my gentoo in
an LDOM, I had to use an ISO from 2009. But I think also the binutils
package might need some work.

-kp