On Wed, 28 Nov 2001, David Maxwell wrote:

> I've heard rumours that the code is largely a port of NetBSD's sparc64
> support. While that's fine, since the license says you can do what you
> want with it - I do end up wondering why people are investing the time
> in doing that, instead of just installing NetBSD.
> 
> Any idea what Jake's motivation is/was?

Well, I just asked him about it, and he says that very little code is 
taken from NetBSD. In essence, all he took was the device support, which 
he admits is very good. However, the core kernel isn't taken at all from 
NetBSD. I believe his motivation is "personal challenge" -- he wanted to 
write a kernel for a platform that he feels is good, but which is lacking 
widespread support.

He's using NetBSD as a development platform from which he cross-compiles 
binaries, and he said that NetBSD-1.5.x on sparc64 (on his Ultra 10) is so 
slow that it's virtually unusable. As a result he's installed -current, 
but the damn thing keeps breaking into the kernel debugger every so often. 
As such, I would say that NetBSD-sparc64 isn't at production level yet, 
something that he's pushing for with his FreeBSD/sparc64 port.

- Julian

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