Re: Has anyone tried a test in a LDOM on some modern SPARC server?
Sad Clouds <[email protected]> Sun, 12 Oct 2025 07:58:47 +0100
| Newsgroups | gmane.os.netbsd.ports.sparc64 |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
I haven't but there is NetBSD src/sys/arch/sparc64/doc/TODO which I think tracks the latest status. If you are mostly interested in testing user space applications for NetBSD, then systems based on sun4u may be the only choice for now. This is what I use with my own applications, i.e. I use NetBSD cross-compiler on x86-64 to produce sparc64 binaries and then test them on Sun Ultra10. Building even modestly sized executable on this machine is an exercise in frustration, mainly due to the slow 440 MHZ UltraSPARC CPU. It was possible to cross-build NetBSD on SPARC Solaris years ago, but last time I looked it had several issues resulting in build failures (both in src and xsrc trees). I did submit bug reports, but not sure there was much interest in fixing those, so they may still persist to this day. Once those issues are resolved, then you could use SPARC Solaris for all cross-building (various SPARC T2 to M8 CPUs are quite suitable for this job, provided you feed them with enough concurrent tasks to keep all CPU strands busy): 1. Build NetBSD cross-compiler tools + release binaries. 2. Use cross-compiler tools to build your software. 3. Transfer binaries to sun4u system and test there. If in step 2 you use GNU software with autotools, then it may not build properly, as some of it is not designed to work with cross-compilers. For my own software I use custom Makefiles and scripts, which are designed to be portable across multiple tools chains: native and cross-compilers, GCC, Clang, Sun Studio, etc. I think I looked at using autotools many years ago and quickly abandoned them.