Re: Anyone have working pre-v8 machines?

[Matthew Wallis <mattw%madmonks.org@localhost>]

I have two working Sparc IPX, with a couple of CG6 SBUS cards and AAUI Ethernet adaptors.

I’m probably going to dispose of them soon. I can’t justify turning them on, there’s nothing they can do that can’t be done better by a Rasperry Pi or clone in 5W, including most likely running SunOS with qemu-sparc.

Matt

--
Matthew Wallis
mattw%madmonks.org@localhost

> On 6 Apr 2022, at 03:58, Martin Husemann <martin%duskware.de@localhost> wrote:
> 
> Hey folks,
> 
> you may have seen membar_* changes suggested by Taylor on tech-kern,
> and a minor part of that are bug fixes to the sparc implementations.
> These are very important, as for example it is impossible to run
> threaded sparc userland programs under COMPAT_NETBSD32 on sparc64 SMP
> machines - and this includes most parts of our automatic tests.
> 
> This is a bit tricky if we want to support single libs compiled both for
> sparcv8 and older, because:
> 
> - we currently only support multiprocessor sparc machines with v8 cpus
>   (so the relevant barrierrs mostly reduce to nop on others)
> - the proper barrier for v8 machines requires a v8-only instruction
> 
> My theory is that there are no working v7 machines out there any more,
> and if there are, they are permanently turned off. My last SparcStation 2
> died many years ago (and I didn't bother to repair whatever broke).
> 
> Anyone here actually using a pre v8 machine?
> 
> Martin
>