>on Wed, 19 Apr 1995 21:57:50 +0200 Joao Carlos Mendes Luis wrote 
>concerning "Sparc 20 ?" something like this:
>
>>   We're buying a Sparc 20 with Solaris 2.4.  Since I DON'T like
>> Solaris, I'd like to install netbsd for sparc on it.  Does somebody
>> know if the current sparc port runs over Sparc 20 ?  The 1.0 version
>> explicitly says "no sun4m" !!!
>
>This is becoming a FAQ. The answer is "no, but it's on the todo list".
>In fact there are a number of people now, who are "looking at it", but
>it seems like nobody really does it, for which reasons whatsoever.

It's worth adding a few points to this.

I asked pretty much this same question.  The sun4m itself isn't necessarily
a problem (you can get the sparc v8 manual from prentice hall and it pretty
much covers everything).  Some people are in various stages of working on it-
there is some small bits of code already in the tree to deal with the 4m.

However, a couple of people have told that the sparc 20 is a special case -
Sun has made it's design propriatary and isn't giving any info out about it
without signing an NDA (this was told to me by some people who tried very hard
to get the info themselves).  However ... a regular sun4m kernel from SunOS
4.1.3_U1 boots just fine on a sparc 20, which leads me to believe one of two
things:

1) Sun put support for the 20 in SunOS, and it just isn't mentioned anywhere in
   the kernel config files.

2) The differences in the 20 are either in a level not dealt with by the kernel
   or there is some sort of compatibility hardware that makes it work with
   SunOS but isn't as fast/cool/better as the native support in Solaris.

Me, I'm hoping for number 2 :-)

If you really hate Solaris that much, regular SunOS is still an option, of
course.

--Ken