Gentoo Archives: gentoo-sparc

From: kpolberg@××××××××.net
To: gentoo-sparc@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-sparc] Reviving the SPARC port a bit...
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2016 14:20:52
Message-Id: 5693BA3F.2010901@kpolberg.net
In Reply to: [gentoo-sparc] Reviving the SPARC port a bit... by Alex McWhirter
1 On 01/09/2016 03:34 AM, Alex McWhirter wrote:
2 > The sparc port seems to be aging, in particular the installation ISO and
3 > stage 3 archives. I'd like to propose a few things and get some opinions.
4 >
5 > 1. We need new stage 3 libraries and installation ISO's. That's probably
6 > a given.
7 >
8 > 2. We need a stage 3 with a 64bit userland. Thanks to Oracle, we now
9 > have kernel / driver support for many newer sparc boxes that can utilize
10 > large amounts of ram and don't see much of a performance reduction by
11 > running 64bit code. I don't think killing the 32bit userland single-lib
12 > archive is a good idea as some people probably see much better
13 > performance on older boxes. However, we could set the multilib profile
14 > to default to 64bit with 32bit backwards compatibility. We could also
15 > just make new stage 3 profile / profiles.
16 >
17 > 3. Maybe we should consider finalizing the multilib profile, and make it
18 > look more like the x86 profile as far as functionality is concerned.
19 >
20 > I figure there aren't a lot of people around here, but i am willing to
21 > start doing all of this by myself. Who knows, maybe we can attract a few
22 > more developers if the port gets a bit more aligned with the rest of
23 > gentoo. I have quite a few machines at my disposal. A few V215's,
24 > T1000's, M4000's, T5120's, Netra X1's, and probably a few more that i
25 > can't think of at the moment. I plan on setting myself up a few build
26 > servers, anyone else who wants to help is welcome to an account on them.
27 >
28 >
29 New installation ISO's sounds like a plan, when I installed my gentoo in
30 an LDOM, I had to use an ISO from 2009. But I think also the binutils
31 package might need some work.
32
33 -kp