I'd like to put my SPARCclassic (or similar sun4m) to work as
a printserver, hosting an HP deskjet via the parallel port.

dmesg seems to think it's got the port:

bpp0 at sbus0 slot 4 offset 0xc800000 level 2 (ipl 3): DMA rev 2

MAKEDEV produced what seem to be the right stuff too, I think:

crw-------  1 root  wheel  107,   0 Feb 24 20:20 bpp
crw-------  1 root  wheel  107,   0 Feb 24 20:20 bpp0
crw-------  1 root  wheel   37,   0 Feb 24 20:16 lpt0
crw-------  1 root  wheel   37, 256 Feb 24 20:16 lpt0ctl

Printing via the standard NetBSD lpd to /dev/lpt0 typically
results in no output on the printer, flashing the "printer
offline" LED, and lpc reports "waiting for dj to become ready
(offline ?)".

echo/cat some text to /dev/bpp0 directly usually gets something
printed -- not all the text consistently, though.

The printer seems ok -- parallel printing via an i386 box works
as expected.  But using a SPARCclassic would be cooler.  :-)

So, before headscratching much further, I'm wondering if this
is a "should just work" setup, or if the bpp parallel port
driver/hardware(?) isn't quite there on SPARCclassic et al.

Tnx,
sr.