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Murray Stokely 3ec53eefca Add a new news item to note some of the momentum that the sparc64 port 
has gained since the last update on March 10th.  Point to the
installable snapshot on the FTP sites.  Also, correct some typos while
I'm here.
2002-10-06 00:01:09 +00:00

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<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" [
<!ENTITY base CDATA "..">
<!ENTITY date "$FreeBSD: www/en/platforms/sparc.sgml,v 1.10 2002/08/14 17:44:48 blackend Exp $">
<!ENTITY title "FreeBSD/sparc64 Project">
<!ENTITY email 'freebsd-sparc'>
<!ENTITY % includes SYSTEM "../includes.sgml"> %includes;]>
<html>
&header;
<p>This page contains information about porting FreeBSD to UltraSPARC
systems.</p>
<h3>General Information</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="#news">Latest News</a></li>
<li><a href="#history">Port History</a></li>
<li><a href="#faq">Port FAQs</a></li>
<li><a href="mailto:freebsd-sparc@FreeBSD.org">FreeBSD/sparc mailing
list</a></li>
</ul>
<h3>Source Code</h3>
<ul>
<li><a
href="http://people.FreeBSD.org/~obrien/freebsd-sparc/src-981023.tar.gz">src-981023.tar.gz</a>
- early boot code (sun4u)</li>
</ul>
<h3>Documentation and White Papers</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.sun.com/microelectronics/manuals/">Sun
Microelectronics Manuals</a></li>
<li><a href="http://playground.sun.com/pub/1275/home.html">Open
Firmware Home Page (Sun)</a></li>
<li><a
href="http://www.UNIX-systems.org/version2/whatsnew/datasize.html">Data
Size Neutrality</a></li>
<li><a
href="http://www.UNIX-systems.org/version2/whatsnew/lp64_wp.html">Why
LP64?</a></li>
</ul>
<h3>Other Links of Interest</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.geog.ubc.ca/s_linux.html">Linux for SPARC
Processors</a></li>
<li><a
href="http://www.NetBSD.org/Ports/sparc/">NetBSD/SPARC</a></li>
<li><a
href="http://www.OpenBSD.org/sparc.html">OpenBSD/SPARC</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.firmworks.com/">FirmWorks</a></li>
</ul>
<hr noshade>
<h3><a name="news">Latest News</a></h3>
<ul>
<li><p><strong>4 October, 2002</strong> : Impressive progress has
been made since the last update. A fully installable snapshot
is available from <a
href="ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/development/sparc64">ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/development/sparc64</a>.
Thanks to the relatively cheap hardware available from Sun, sparc64
has become the most popular 64-bit platform for FreeBSD
5.0-CURRENT. It is expected that FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE will fully
support sparc64.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>10 March, 2002</strong> : Perl works. Thanks to an in
depth bug report from Garrett Wollman we were able to identify a bug
in the fpu emulator which was causing problems bootstrapping
perl.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>9 March, 2002</strong> : SMP support has been added,
which is known to work on dual ultra 2 and ultra 60 workstations.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>3 March, 2002</strong> : A bootable ISO image is
now available for installing FreeBSD/sparc64 onto a supported
system. Please see the freebsd-sparc mailing list for more
information. The ISO image is available <a
href="http://people.freebsd.org/~jake/sparc64">here</a>.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>26 February, 2002</strong> : David O'Brien has
posted a working self-hosted sparc64 toolchain. You may
download the archive file <a
href="http://people.freebsd.org/~obrien/sparc64/native-uberbaum_20020224.tar.bz2">
here</a>. Untar it in /.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>9 October, 2001</strong> : Jake Burkholder and
Thomas Moestl have been porting FreeBSD to the UltraSparc for
the past few months and first booted a machine into single user
mode on the 18th of October. The log from the serial console can
be found <a
href="http://people.FreeBSD.org/~jake/tip.single_user">here</a>.</p></li>
</ul>
<h3><a name="history">Port History</a></h3>
<p>The FreeBSD/sparc64 platform port was initiated by Jason Evans in
1997. Originally, the port was backed by Sun Microelectronics. Sun
Microelectronics (SME) is the part of Sun that makes
microprocessors. Up until now, SMCC (the part of Sun that makes
workstations) has been the overwhelmingly primary customer of SME.
SME naturally wants to expand its sales, and to do that, they need
to sell CPUs to people outside of Sun. FreeBSD was perceived as
being a way of accomplishing this.</p>
<p>To understand why Sun could fund a FreeBSD port, which would seem
to conflict with Sun's Solaris offerings, you need to realize that
Sun is broken up into separate business units that often
<strong>compete</strong> with each other. The Solaris people at
Sun may not like having a FreeBSD port to compete with, but their
power to prevent it is somewhat diminished due to the business
model. Of course, if the FreeBSD port were a major threat, SMI
(the main Sun umbrella company) would put a stop to it. However,
this is unlikely, since FreeBSD mostly meets the needs of a
different market sector than Solaris. Solaris does wonderful
things on big MP servers. FreeBSD is fast and lean for small
servers. It is also useful for certain types of embedded
applications, which is actually the main reason SME is interested
in seeing a port of FreeBSD to UltraSPARC.</p>
<p>A while back, SME approached the FreeBSD core team and offered
monetary compensation of some nature in exchange for an official
UltraSPARC port. The core team turned down this offer. The exact
reasons are known only to the core team, but Jordan Hubbard
implied that SME's offer was not of major interest since to be of
long term use to FreeBSD, such a proposal would need to include
support for a number of years from someone internal to Sun.</p>
<p>Jason Evans started working at SME in September of 1997. During
the first week, he caught wind of the negotiations SME was making
with the core team. Jason expressed extreme interest in working
on the project. Through a bit of persistence (and the failure of
the proposal made by SME), he was given permission to begin work
on the port.</p>
<p>Jason's other duties SME included finding information for
software vendors who are porting their OSes/RTOSes to the
UltraSPARC. This put him in a good position to gather hardware
information pertinent to the FreeBSD port.</p>
<p>Jason was instrumental in getting the FreeBSD/sparc64 port done,
and doing much of the initial planning. Sun Microsystems has
since backed out of their support for the FreeBSD/sparc64 effort,
and Jason Evans eventually left Sun.</p>
<p>Paolo Di Francesco was the next "father" of the port. Paolo
attempted, for the first time in the history of the port, to
organize information, developers, and tasks into a structure that
can only be known as project management. If not for the 98-99
holiday season and a few outspoken individuals on the mailing list,
Paolo would have continued on. During his tenure, a number of
people stepped up to work on the older Sun SPARC architectures.
This did cause a slight chasm in the project, and many of the more
qualified individuals were on the side of the UltraSPARC family of
machines. Luckily, this didn't end up a period of quiet on the
mailing list, as Telecom Italia provided us with a list keep-alive.
A glitch in their system caused one of Paolo's posts to keep coming
back and back and back and back... This repeat post continued well
into 1999, when the list did once again become mostly silent.</p>
<p>In 2000, Jake Burkholder and Thomas Moestl have made an
incredible amount of work on the sparc port. Most of the
development has taken place in the Perforce repository on
freefall, and has only been merged to the HEAD (-CURRENT branch)
of CVS after more careful testing. David O'Brien has done a lot
of work to provide a usable toolchain for FreeBSD/sparc64
development. Until one of the above mentioned people updates this
paragraph, please see the mailing list archives. ;)</p>
<hr noshade>
<h3><a name="faq">Frequently Asked Questions</a></h3>
<ol>
<li><a href="#1">What happened to the old FAQ?</a></li>
<li><a href="#2">What is the status of the port?</a></li>
<li><a href="#3">What machines will FreeBSD/sparc64 run on?</a></li>
<li><a href="#4">Does FreeBSD/sparc64 support device X?</a></li>
<li><a href="#5">Will FreeBSD/sparc64 run Solaris/SunOS binaries?</a></li>
</ol>
<h4><a name="1">What happened to the old FAQ?</a></h4>
<p>It's right <a
href="http://people.FreeBSD.org/~obrien/freebsd-sparc/oldfaq.html">here</a>.
The old FAQ is SME-centric, and sun4u-specific. These traits do
not reflect the current state of the port, since SME has pulled
their official support from the port and the majority of the
development equipment now consists of older Sun SPARC hardware.
Furthermore, there haven't been a lot of frequently asked questions
of late. Most of the items in the old FAQ date back to before the
mailing list was being archived.</p>
<h4><a name="2">What is the status of the port?</a></h4>
<p>It is possible to boot a number of newer UltraSparc hardware
platforms into FreeBSD with time and patience. Please see the <a
href="&base;/relnotes/CURRENT/hardware/sparc64/index.html">FreeBSD/sparc64
Hardware Notes</a> for more information.</p>
<h4><a name="3">What machines will FreeBSD/sparc64 run on?</a></h4>
<p>Please see the <a
href="&base;/relnotes/CURRENT/hardware/sparc64/index.html">FreeBSD/sparc64
Hardware Notes</a> for more information.</p>
<h4><a name="4">Does FreeBSD/sparc64 support device X?</a></h4>
<p>See <a href="#3">question #3</a>.</p>
<h4><a name="5">Will FreeBSD/sparc64 run Solaris/SunOS binaries?</a></h4>
<p>It is reasonable to say that FreeBSD/sparc64 will provide some
Solaris/SunOS emulation. It is too early in the life of the port to
answer this any more specifically.</p>
&footer;
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