I used to work in a shop with a fleet of 40 Sparc 1, 2, SLC, ELC, IPC 
and IPX machines.  We had about 10 Sparc 2 machines running at once in the
same room, all running identical software images.  A couple of the Sparc 2
machines would often have programs that would randomly drop core,
spontaneously reboot, or just act strangely.  One of these machines refused
to run Solaris when it had mor than 48MB of memory installed.  SunOS4 ran
fine, no problem.  When we sent the machine back to Sun for investigation,
they told us that they couldn't really diagnose the problem because our
machine was a revision 2 model, and the oldest they had in their test lab
was a revision 6 model.  
	What I took away from that was that the Sparc 1 and 2 machines
went through a lot of revisioning, silently from the customer's
perspective, and given many customers habbits of buying machines piecemeal,
the likelihood that a customer would have two identical machines in his
shop seems extremely low.  Thus, I could belive that some folks are running
Sparc 1 and 1+ machines with no problem, while others are having endless
unexplained failures.
	It makes me wonder how long NetBSD should try to continue
supporting the Sun4c line.  Many of those machines are well over 10 years
old now, and I wonder, realistically, how many are still in use by
developers and testers.  I know of some in production use, but they're
definitely on the retirement track.  How hard is it for developers to
maintain backward compatibility effectively when there's no testing base to
prove that it still works?
-Brian
On Aug 9,  1:42pm, matthew green wrote:
} Subject: re: 1.6 woes (pmap vs. UBC?)
}    
}    >that is my understanding.  i've basically stopped using sun4c's...
}    
}    >for *ever* i had weird traps and maintained a patched trap.c that
}    >was supposed to provide extra info but i never managed to figure it
}    >out and none of the stuff i sent to pk over the years made sense
}    >to him either.... it was only a problem "rarely" - my systems often
}    >stayed up months, but never more than 6...
}    
}    I have an SS2 running 1.4.3A that runs Bigbrother for my network. That
}    consists of the BB server plus Apache. It seems to stay up as long as
}    the power doesn't go off long enough to drain the UPS. 
}    
}    seahag# uname -a
}    NetBSD seahag 1.4.3A NetBSD 1.4.3A (SEAHAG) #0: Mon Oct 22 19:06:00 MDT 2001     rmk@seahag:/usr/src/sys/arch/sparc/compile/SEAHAG sparc
}    seahag# uptime
}     3:28AM  up 118 days, 16:01, 2 users, load averages: 1.76, 1.88, 1.39
}    
}    The worst load is browsing the web server as the CGI is all written in
}    Bourne shell.
} 
} 
} yeah.  for a Long Time, i thought my problems were somethingn local
} because (a) no one else ever seemed to report anything and (b) it
} happened so rarely..  i've always been aware that it's something
} that some people just don't see...
} 
} 
} and, unlike mouse, i had both user & kernel faults, the latter ending
} up as panics of course.
>-- End of excerpt from matthew green