Re: M4000 failing to boot Debian Sparc64

On 7/3/23 05:47, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> 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
> 

Dear Sir :

     I just want to follow up to let you know that I am giving this idea
some reasonable thought. I suspect the costs and efforts to be quite a
bit higher. Merely my own experience in such a collective endeavor where
the benefit is hardly measurable with such a small userbase. Having said
that, I must also admit that the userbase is so minuscule for precisely
the reason one would consider fixing this mess!