>(1) There's about a small handful of people in the world trying to use the
>    SPARC port, and half of them seem to be Sun employees posting from machines
>    outside Sun so as to avoid that horrible risk of committing a CLM
>    (Career-Limiting Move (-: )

Hmm. I wonder who you might be talking about... :-)

Certainly the two people who have put the most into the sparc (Paul Kranenbug
and myself) ... as far as I know don't work for Sun.

>(2) The discussion on current-users is so x86-oriented that it makes me wonder
>    if any of the changes which are made and/or thrown about on the mailing
>    list are ever tried out on the other "ports" before they're committed

The other ports are quite stable. As you will note from source-changes,
many of our changes are to ensure that all ports have a stable ground
to work from. We don't accept processor specific hacks outside of
/sys/arch, so you need not worry about that.

>(3) The Sun OpenBoot PROM manual describes how to create a bootable floppy, but
>    I don't recall seeing any references to same in the port-sparc archives

I don't even have this manual. Is there anyone who can send me it?

>(4) Some of the code appears to have come from Chris Torek's 4.4BSD efforts at
>    LBL; I don't know what the status of that code is or what will happen to it
>    in the future (I'm aware that he's now working for BSD,i)

Much of it -- he gave it to us. The code hasn't been shipped purely because
it's such a pain in the ass to setup a machine with it at the moment.

>would love to use as a guinea pig, but given the above it looks a little too

There's plenty of people who want to be guinea pigs, just hang on a bit
more. There's only two sparcstations running NetBSD/sparc at the moment
but it does work. Just a few things to resolve...

NetBSD 0.9b (TDR) #23: Sun Jan 23 01:21:25 MST 1994
  deraadt@komodo:/tmp_mnt/home/new/sys/arch/sparc/compile/TDR
real mem = 12386304
avail mem = 10412032
using 151 buffers containing 618496 bytes of memory
mainbus0 (root)
cpu0 at mainbus0: Sun 4/40 (MB86900/1A or L64801 @ 25 MHz, WTL3170/2 FPU)
cpu0: 65536 byte write-through, 16 bytes/line, sw flush cache enabled
memreg0 at mainbus0 ioaddr 0xf4000000
clock0 at mainbus0 ioaddr 0xf2000000: mk48t02 (eeprom)
timer0 at mainbus0 ioaddr 0xf3000000
zs0 at mainbus0 ioaddr 0xf1000000 pri 12, softpri 6
zs1 at mainbus0 ioaddr 0xf0000000 pri 12, softpri 6
fd at mainbus0 ioaddr 0xf7200000 not configured
audio0 at mainbus0 ioaddr 0xf7201000 pri 13, softpri 4
sbus0 at mainbus0 ioaddr 0xf8000000: clock = 25 MHz
dma0 at sbus0 slot 0 offset 0x400000: rev 1
esp0 at sbus0 slot 0 offset 0x800000 pri 3: ESP100, clock = 25 MHz, ID = 7
tg0 at esp0 target 1
sd0 at tg0 unit 0: QUANTUM P105SS 910-10-94 8.9, 205075 512 byte blocks
sd0: <Quantum ProDrive 105S cyl 974 alt 2 hd 6 sec 35>
tg1 at esp0 target 3
sd1 at tg1 unit 0: MAXTOR LXT-213S SUN0207 4.17, 415436 512 byte blocks
sd1: <SUN0207 cyl 1254 alt 2 hd 9 sec 36>
le0 at sbus0 slot 0 offset 0xc00000 pri 5: hardware address 08:00:20:0a:66:45
bwtwo0 at sbus0 slot 3 offset 0x0: SUNW,501-1561, 1152 x 900 (console)
auxreg0 at mainbus0 ioaddr 0xf7400000
Found boot device le0
boothowto =       22, bootdv = f824ec00
[croc bin 117 ]# uname -a
NetBSD croc 0.9b TDR#23 sparc

"Soon."

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