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
