Gentoo dropping support of SPARC

Posted Jun 6, 2017 20:22 UTC (Tue) by prometheanfire (subscriber, #65683)
In reply to: Gentoo dropping support of SPARC by mageta
Parent article: Gentoo dropping support of SPARC

Ya, in fact we are looking into getting more sparc hardware for testing.

Gentoo dropping support of SPARC

Posted Jun 7, 2017 8:54 UTC (Wed) by glaubitz (subscriber, #96452) [Link] (4 responses)

> Ya, in fact we are looking into getting more sparc hardware for testing.

What you should do first is switch the default from sparcv9 (32 bits) to sparcv9 (64 bits) which is what we did in Debian.

> https://lists.debian.org/debian-sparc/2016/06/msg00126.html

Also, Oracle itself is fully investing the 64-bit port themselves. In fact, they offer two Linux distributions for sparc64:

> http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/linux/do...
> https://oss.oracle.com/projects/linux-sparc/

But since Oracle's distributions require at least sun4v machines, many people will be better off running Debian sparc64
which also has many more and up-to-date packages.

Adrian

Gentoo dropping support of SPARC

Posted Jun 7, 2017 13:17 UTC (Wed) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link] (3 responses)

> What you should do first is switch the default from sparcv9 (32 bits) to sparcv9 (64 bits) which is what we did in Debian.

Well sure, if their goal is to exclude using 32bit sparc systems with Gentoo. But perhaps that is not their goal.

Gentoo dropping support of SPARC

Posted Jun 7, 2017 13:34 UTC (Wed) by glaubitz (subscriber, #96452) [Link] (2 responses)

> Well sure, if their goal is to exclude using 32bit sparc systems with Gentoo. But perhaps that is not their goal.

sparcv9 *is* a 64-bit architecture. There is currently no usable 32-bit SPARC support in Linux.

What Gentoo (and Debian's "sparc" port used) is using is "sparc64" with 32-bit pointers. Gentoo for
SPARC requires at least an UltraSPARC machine (sun4u) and all of these are 64-bit.

If you boot a current version of Gentoo on a SPARC and run "uname -a" it will say "sparc64", it's
just the userland that is 32-bit. And Oracle is currently investing all resources into sparc64
which is why the best idea would be to fully switch to sparc64 like Debian and OpenBSD already
did.

Gentoo dropping support of SPARC

Posted Jun 7, 2017 13:48 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

It's worth mentioning that the oldest UltraSPARC/sun4u machines are over two decades old now. (And a modern smartphone is more than an order of magnitude more capable, even before the GPU is factored in..)

Gentoo dropping support of SPARC

Posted Jun 7, 2017 13:54 UTC (Wed) by glaubitz (subscriber, #96452) [Link]

> It's worth mentioning that the oldest UltraSPARC/sun4u machines are over two decades old now.

Exactly. And all of these are fully supported by the sparc64 ports of Debian and OpenBSD. They're not
supported by Oracle's own distributions Linux for SPARC and Oracle Linux though as these require
"sun4v". But Oracle fully supports the development of sparc64.

They are working on: golang, the kernel, GRUB, Ocaml, gcc, binutils and much more.

People interested in Linux on SPARC should join #sparc on Freenode.