On Wed, 22 May 1996, Peter Galbavy wrote:
> > 	What is the status of Sun4m architecture support in the
> > latest NetBSD-current tree? It looks to me like it's in the source,
> > but I don't see bootstrapping kernel binaries anywhere that one
> > could use to actually get a system up and running.
> 
> It could not be easier.
> 
> NetBSD/sparc has a *major* advantage over both SunOS and Solaris
> on the SPARC platform. A suitable kernel will run correctly on
> sun4, sun4c and sun4m. The boot blocks for the 4c and 4m are the
> same, and only need the first 32 bytes stripped for the sun4
> architechture.
> 

Don't forget, though, that a "GENERIC" kernel is much less efficient than
an architecture-specific kernel, since a bunch of the pmap (memory 
management) stuff and trap vectoring/interrupt processing goes through
jump tables on a GENERIC kernel instead of direct calls in an 
architecture-specific kernel. Moral: for convenience, use GENERIC; for
performance, compile-your-own SUN4M specific kernel.

--Aaron