Hi all!
A moment long awaited, after having worked for more than 6 years of working on
ArcticFox.
It starts, displays and work on NetBSD sparc64! (NetBSD ppc32 too, btw).
Challenges were not easy and while some fixes kept in flowing the target also moved.
v47.2 is out today and brings back support! Binary provided for the curious.
Screenshot shows it running on NetraT1!
Only real drawback is the core NetBSD issue: a build means always a full build, it
reconfigures always from scratch. Other OSs (including OpenBSD and FreeBSD) are not
affected by this. It makes testing very hard.
To give an idea: on my 2-core amd64 NetBSD build it takes 2 hours, on my G4 1.33GHz
iBook it takes 4-5hours, on my Netra T1 Ultra IIe 500Mhz it takes 40 hours!
Change a single line and all starts again! For build farms it is not detected, but
for development it is a hard take.
Apart that for some reason compiling on UltraSPARC appears quite slow, it is a NetBSD
issue that should be fixed, if somebody wants to help.
alexnia suggested a shell issue and apparently hard-replacing sh with bash fixes it,
I never tried since it is a dangerous thing to do.
Riccardo