Le dim. 20 déc. 2020 à 09:54, Julian Calaby <julian.calaby@xxxxxxxxx> a écrit : > If I want to run them, assuming the hardware still works, I need to > netboot them as I cannot find working, compatible HDDs for them as > everything has switched to SATA or SAS. SCSI2SD (<http://www.codesrc.com/mediawiki/index.php/SCSI2SD>) are a bit expensive, but solve that problem (I own both a V5 and a V6, both work well in my SPARCstations, tried sun4c and sun4m). As it takes micro-sd cards, it's quite easy to keep multiple OSes on hand. > Then there's the issue of finding a monitor as they're not > electrically compatible with VGA Huh? There is Sun's 13W3-to-vga adapters and cables, and many monitors will sync to Sun's frequency (though not the most recent LCDs whose analog circuitry is pathetic compared to old-school CRTs). Some framebuffers will output 1280x1024 (rarer than for 1152x900), and some can be coerced to do almost anything with some Forth knowledge (see e.g. <https://github.com/rdolbeau/SunTurboGX>, again blowing my own horn here sorry...). > (...) booting one up for fun is simply impractical An SCSI2SD and either a null-modem serial cable or a Sun keyboard/13w3 cable/17"LCD combo and you're good to go. You might need another unix-like box to netboot the system. > I believe that Gentoo is architecture-neutral enough that it'd work, > but I believe that you'll have to compile everything - there'll be no > pre-built anything for sparc32 Trying gentoo is on my todo list... has been for a long time :-( > and as it's fairly slow hardware by > today's standards, that's going to take a long time, however you could > probably use distcc and cross-compilers to speed it up. Isn't that what Qemu is for ? :-) I've managed to recompile LLVM and clang in NetBSD 9 for my SS20, one by cross-compiling (LLVM requires too much memory), the other in QEmu. Unfortunately, Qemu doesn't yet support mt-tcg (multithreaded emulation) for sparc so single-core only - still faster than the HW, mostly because of incomparably faster I/O. > If there were more people using it or more testing, or more distros > supporting it - not just (theoretically?) working on it - then I'd be > fighting to keep it. I wish I had some arguments for that point... I will just re-mention Qemu, as it makes testing quite easy and reasonably not-too-slow. Cordially, -- Romain Dolbeau
