Hello! On 1/11/21 3:55 PM, chase rayfield wrote:
My take is that there *would* be more interest in Sparc sun4m / Sun4d from enthusiasts at the very least if it was possible to actually boot the bloat hog that is Linux these days in a fully usable configuration that probably means some modifications to SILO and Linux required.
The Linux kernel is configurable. If you want a small kernel, then just configure one. No one expects you to boot a fully-fledged distribution kernel on these machines.
The problem is as I understand it, SILO only sets up a 16Mb mapping (either due to having to assume 4MB minimum dram stick size or due to mapping limitations not sure, most of these machines have at least 16MB in slot one...these days though that wasn't the case for sun4c), loads Linux into it and says good Luck. This isn't enough for a modern kernel with any hardware support built in. So you might for instance get a kernel to fit but only if you dropped all of networking support etc...
That makes no sense. It worked in the past, why shouldn't it work nowadays? As I said, you disable everything you don't need. I'm booting my SH-7785LCR SuperH board with a kernel that is less than 4 MB in size and which includes everything I need.
I'm guessing the fix for this would be to modify silo to map a larger amount in a way that Linux expects so it can remap it as it likes, or just have SILO map the full memory as Linux would. Anyway that is THE main demotivation for these architectures.... otherwise they have plenty of ram and performance to do basic router/server tasks sans SSL.
Or just configure a smaller kernel.
This has been the status quo for since the last of the 2.6 series of kernels which it was still possible to just barely squeeze a usable kernel out of... If someone wanted to take a few hours and fix this issue, and keep these architectures around I'd be happy to "buy them a round of pizza", though I recognize that many people that work on this already have nice jobs, and just don't have time.
I haven't gotten around to setup my SPARCstation 5 yet, but I will certainly going to do that later this year to give it a try.
Also Sparc would probably be a good project for someone to extend/test Andi Keen's Linux LTO patch set so we could reduce the kernel binary size that way also even if sun4 architectures are dropped, it would still be useful for embedded sparc. Also there is a port of Temlib to the Mister hardware now, 3 cores roughly equivalent to a mid 90s machine, at least 128MB ram is possible ( more if a way to map the ARM system memory also 1GB is available there, it would have higher latency though). It is perfectly viable to build Sparc v7 or v8 32bit binaries in a chroot on a fast machine also, and I would recommend this if you wish to retain sanity rather than attempting cross compiler voodoo, unless that is your thing.
We build anything SPARC on a SPARC T5 that we have for Debian, no need for cross-compilation and that machine is actually quite fast. Adrian -- .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz : :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@xxxxxxxxxx `. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
