[I've kept just port-sparc64 and dropped tech-kern.]

> > Is there anyone out there who might be interested in porting NetBSD
> > to the Sun OpenSparc T1 architecture?   This is a very interesting
> > chip: It has 8 cores with 4 hardware threads per core, plus some other
> > interesting tricks up its sleeve...
>
> It's also available with less cores.

Yes.  But it's an 8 core design; the 4 and 6 core versions are
just to increase manufacturing yield.  There is a T2 in the works,
but we should stick to what's real now.

> > Getting this to work would be a big step forward for the Sparc64 port
> > and SMP on NetBSD in general.
>
> Hmm, I'm not sure how much the T1 resembles III and IV, but it would be
> a good thing if those were supported as well. As well as SMP on sparc64,
> ofcourse. But given the fact that support for those is currently
> lacking, I'm not sure how soon it'll surface?

I have no idea how soon.  The chip is binary-compatible to sparcv9,
but there are some differences under the hood.  The platform is
called "sun4v" (as opposed to "sun4u), and there is a hypervisor
layer "below" the OpenSparc cores.

The difference is that for USIII and USIV, not all documentation
is available.  For the T1, there is...


Regards -- Volker
-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Volker A. Brandt                  Consulting and Support for Sun Solaris
Brandt & Brandt Computer GmbH              WWW: http://www.bb-c.de/~vab/
Meckenheim, Germany                                   Email: vab@bb-c.de