Re: sun2 and playstation2 ports to be moved into Attic

[Izumi Tsutsui <tsutsui%ceres.dti.ne.jp@localhost>]

jnemeth%victoria.tc.ca@localhost wrote:

> On Apr 4,  6:28pm, Antti Kantee wrote:
> } On Fri Nov 13 2009 at 06:36:31 +0900, Izumi Tsutsui wrote:
> } > > > > The sun2 and playstation2 ports have been neglected for a long time 
> and
> } > > > > neither has successfully completed an installation in recent 
> history.
> } > > > 
> } > > > What's the problem on sun2? Is there any such PR?
> } > > 
> } > > There was no portmaster.
> } > 
> } > sparc has own MACHINE_ARCH and no portmaster.
> } > What do you think about it?
> 
>      sparc is a fairly significant port with lots of users and
> developers maintaining it.

Probably you should read whole messages you quoted.

There is at least one hobby user on sun2 port.
He noticed NetBSD/sun2 3.0 worked fine even on multiuser,
but also found PAM support on static environment was broken.
Then he filed a PR about it, a developer fixed it, and
the fix was pulled up to netbsd-3 and netbsd-3-0.
He also fixed an m68k soft-float related gcc4 bug and
also fixed many Makefile bugs on static environment.
He also provided CAS routines for m68010 (no real CAS
instruction on it) based on existing implementation,
that could be a showstoppwer after vmlocking merge.
He also found another minor gcc bugs caused by -O1
which also occurs on i386 and put a workaround during 5.0_RC.
He can still test a GENERIC kernel even on the emulator.
Daily builds against sun2 still found a number of MI bugs
which only appearred on a certain (but not sun2 specific)
environment.

> It doesn't cause headaches like sun2.

Now, "what causes your headaches on sun2 port?"
Broken build caused by non-sun2 specific bugs?
Or one paranoiac user? ;-p

On the other hand, I don't object if we will move daily builds
for such tier 2 or 3 ports to weekly (or biweekly) build servers.

>      Even if it does run, is it useful?  Is there any real hardware
> left that functions?  According to Wikipedia max. RAM was 8 MB.  Is
> that useful for running modern NetBSD and semi-modern apps?

BTW, max. RAM is 7MB. (some spaces are reserved for framebuffer)

Actually it also has only 16MB virtual space, so even
modern fat gcc4 won't work on it, but all default programs
invoked from rc.d (including postfix) seem working.
IMO it might still be worth that we can demonstrate
"of course it runs NetBSD" anywhere on the TME emulator
on modern hardware, unless maintenance costs for the port
won't become so expensive than the benefit.
---
Izumi Tsutsui