Gentoo/FreeBSD available for Sparc64

Hi List!

The first Gentoo/FreeBSD/Sparc64 stage [1] is ready for testing!
There are a few rough edges, namely you have to compile all kernel stuff you 
need into the kernel as loading modules causes a kernel panic. This is 
probably a gcc related error as upstream uses gcc-3.4.x by default.

Installation requires downloading the FreeBSD Sparc64 installation CD. From 
there you can choose the fixit options to get to a shell where you can 
partition your disk and follow the usual instructions [2] for stage 
extraction and system building.

NOTES
All modules have to be built into the kernel - kldload causes kernel panics 
about memory not aligned. I'm pretty sure this is gcc-4 related as my kernel 
patch doesn't touch module loading code.

You can only boot from ad0. You can probably boot from ad1, but I only have 
the one disk so I cannot say for certain. I'm 99% sure you cannot boot from a 
specific slice / partition as sparc does not seem too support that.

Only gcc-4.1 is supported - anything lower will not work for building a 
kernel. This is because older versions do not correctly define __arch64__ 
when compiling 64-bit code.

We have a custom FreeBSD patches that replace all __sparc64__ defines to 
__sparc__ [3]. If the code is really 64-bit related (most is not) then we use 
the __arch64__ define too. Only FreeBSD sources appear to use the __sparc64__ 
define as I've successfully built and tested large external packages such as 
postgresql, samba and many more and none of them use that define.

Some packages assume that sparc CHOST is always sparc-*-* (bug #151715) - this 
is the case for Linux where the userland is always 32-bit and the kernel is 
64-bits, but for FreeBSD the kernel won't run any 32-bit code so the CHOST is 
sparc64-gentoo-freebsdx.x (x.x being the freebsd version).

Thanks

[1] http://gentoo.osuosl.org/experimental/sparc/freebsd/
[2] http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-freebsd.xml
[3] __sparc64__ define is not a guarantee of 64-bit code according to gcc 
developers

-- 
Roy Marples <uberlord@gentoo.org>
Gentoo Developer (baselayout, networking)
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