>>(1) There's about a small handful of people in the world trying to use the
>>    SPARC port, and half of them seem to be Sun [folks] posting from machines
>>    outside Sun so as to avoid that horrible risk of committing a CLM
>>    (Career-Limiting Move (-: )
>
>Hmm.  I wonder who you might be talking about ... (-:

The other half (-:

>Certainly the two people who have put the most into the SPARC (Paul Kranenburg
>and myself) ... as far as I know don't work for Sun.

See above :-)

(Me, I'm still jealous of Paul for having taken my "xdocviewer" idea and then
 having bettered it a million times over with "xnav" ... (-: )

>>(2) The discussion on current-users is so x86-oriented that it makes me wonder
>>    if any of the changes which are made and/or thrown about on the mailing
>>    list are ever tried out on the other "ports" before they're committed
>
>The other ports are quite stable.  As you will note from source-changes, many
>of our changes are to ensure that all ports have a stable ground to work from.
>We don't accept processor-specific hacks outside of /sys/arch, so you need not
>worry about that.
>
>>(3) The Sun OpenBoot PROM manual describes how to create a bootable floppy,
>>    but I don't recall seeing any ref's to same in the port-sparc archives
>
>I don't even have this manual.  Is there anyone who can send me it?

Do you have a Solaris 2.3 AnswerBook CD-ROM handy?  That entire manual is on
it, in PostScript format.  Given that we have a big honkin' QMS printer at work
that can do double-sided, I decided to sacrifice a few trees ...

As for the bootable floppy stuff, it's pretty trivial.  The 4.1.x instructions
are essentially:

- fdformat
- newfs -v -i 4096 /dev/rfd0a
- mount /dev/fd0a /mnt
- cp -p /boot /mnt/boot
- /usr/mdec/installboot -vl /mnt/boot /usr/mdec/bootfd /dev/rfd0a
- cp -p [file to boot] /mnt
- umount /mnt
- eject floppy

Of course, that alone will only get you a standalone program like "stand/diag";
so I tried to go a little further.

[ as above ]
...
- cp -p netbsd.sparc /mnt
- chmod +x netbsd.sparc
- ln /mnt/netbsd.sparc /mnt/vmunix
- mkdir /mnt/sbin
- chown root.wheel /mnt/netbsd.sparc
- chown bin.staff /mnt/sbin
- cp -p /sbin/sh /mnt/sbin/sh
- cp -p /sbin/init /mnt/sbin/init

The problem at this point is that you run out of space on the floppy filesystem
)-:

The other weird problem is that "mkfs" seems to ignore "-i" arguments that are
larger than 4k (default is 2k).  When I did a default newfs it created a FS
with 640 inodes; so I thought "Well I'll save a few Kb by making it 32k and
shrinking the # of inodes down to around 40 or so instead".  So I tried it and
"newfs" dutifully said "I'm passing -i 32768 to `mkfs'", but the net result
was ~320 inodes - half of the default instead of 1/16th.  So I didn't have
enough room to get /sbin/mount onto it.

The other problem is that even booting with "-asb" and specifying "/fd" for
the root filesystem, at the end of the kernel boot it asks for the root
device and it absolutely refuses to take an answer other than "sd<something>".
Sigh.  Of course you can't say "sd0a" because then it can't find /sbin/mount
(presumably) to mount it ...

(On the other hand, VERY impressed to see the kernel boot up on a SPARCstation
2/GX as far as it did ... )

We either need much bigger floppies than 1.44 Mb or else we need "NetBSD-lite"
in the kernel dept. ... a WAY stripped down (to bare essentials) version, as
we'd need at least another 100-200 Kb to put "mount" et al. on the floppy.
And a way to solve the "No, I won't let you say `fd0a' for `Where is root?'"
problem.

>>(4) Some of the code appears to have come from Chris Torek's 4.4BSD efforts at
>>    LBL; I don't know what the status of that code is or what will happen to
>>    it in the future (I'm aware that he's now working for BSD,i)
>
>Much of it - he gave it to us.  The code hasn't been shipped purely because
>it's such a pain in the ass to setup a machine with it at the moment.

The code hasn't been shipped with what?  NetBSD?  4.4BSD?  BSDI?  (-:

>There's plenty of people who want to be guinea pigs, just hang on a bit more.
>There's only two SPARCstations running NetBSD/sparc at the moment, but it does
>work.  Just a few things to resolve ...
...
>"Soon."

Well, this "port-sparc" list seems to have been nearly completely dormant over
the past few months, so I was beginning to wonder ...

Are you at liberty to comment on the "just a few things" there are to resolve?

Thanks,

	- Greg

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