Re: M4000 failing to boot Debian Sparc64

Hello!

On Mon, 2023-07-03 at 05:28 -0400, Dennis Clarke wrote:
> > I don't think that's true. Since it has been reported that these machines
> > run OpenBSD, it should be a matter of reading the OpenBSD kernel sources
> > and add the missing bits and pieces for the SPARC64 VII(+) machines to the
> > Linux kernel.
> 
> Are we certain about NetBSD or OpenBSD? I did try to install NetBSD and
> that failed also. I think I have my notes on that somewhere but it would
> be easy enough for me to try again.

OpenBSD lists the M4000 as supported:

> https://www.openbsd.org/sparc64.html

While I didn't actually mention NetBSD here, since it's not the same as OpenBSD,
I checked that as well now and it currently doesn't support Fujitsu CPUs, but
that's work-in-progress, same applies to sun4v, i.e. T1-T5. For sun4v, I'm actually
in contact with the developer doing the work.

> https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/sparc64/

> > I don't think that would be much as this it just some board-specific code
> > and it wouldn't probably take an experienced kernel developer longer than
> > a month if at all.
> 
> That brings the costs down to the level of reasonable. Let me ponder
> that a while.

Find someone on the sparclinux Linux kernel mailing list willing to do the work
and create a Bountysource campaign to sponsor the work. I assume, you can get
it done for maybe $5000-$10.000.

Adrian

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer
`. `'   Physicist
  `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913