Re: "State of the Union" for the port (9.3)

Hi,

vom513 wrote:
> Thanks for the reply and info.  See replies below inline.
>
>> On Dec 23, 2022, at 4:13 AM, Romain Dolbeau <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> Le ven. 23 déc. 2022 à 09:34, vom513 <[email protected]> a écrit :
>>> I have an SS20 (4m) and an IPX (4c) I’d be interested in putting NetBSD on.

Should work. My SS20 with 2x HyperSparc works with 9.3! My SS10 with 2x 
SuperSparc still runs 8.x series... and runs very well
NetBSD 9 works also on SS4 and SS5.

It does not boot on my IPC (although there are fixes around I need to 
find the time to try), but your IPX is newer and may work.

Things got slower and more power hungry, disk I/O isn't a wow, hard to 
tell if the kernel/userland got slower or I had a twisted memory of 
things being faster years ago :)

>
> Foot in mouth for me :/  I don’t have a ZX (I think that’s the big double width SBUS FB ?).  I have an 8mb VSIMM in the SS20 - so cg14 / SX.  I got my *X designations mixed up...
>
> On that note - does NetBSD support 1280x1024 with this “card” ?  I have this resolution+freq set in eeprom and under Solaris it looks much nicer than 1152 - especially on a semi-modern 4:3 LCD monitor.  Very crisp.

Yes, the ZX is a chimaera... as are certain processor modules which are 
impossible hard to find now.
SX worked a bit slow last time I tried, but I do attach a monitor only 
to debug, as I run my sparcstation headless, just for the fun to 
compile, test BigEndian, not as "real workstation". I prefer to export 
display: this save space, I can pile up computers and plug the relevant in.

> Oh wow, that sounds nice.  I’ll file that in my ever-growing rainy day list for something to dig into and figure out / get set up.
>
> Perhaps a dumb question (general NetBSD question) - I see various binary packages built (even for sparc !) - and the version says 9.0.  Can these be installed on 9.3 ?  Based on how many 9.0 packages I saw - I’m guessing the package mainly cares about major rev and not minor ?

Yes, binaries should be compatible, otherwise it is a bug, right? You 
will get a warning but it works. Usually ready packages were always 
built on the previous version.

I did build several packages natively more than a year ago. I was 
thinking of giving an update respin and then "save" the binaries to 
share among my computers, but also with others. Better doing that in 
rainy winter days... in the summer those machines suffer if they have 2x 
CPUs.

Welcome to the club.

Riccardo