Since the subject of Linux emulation on SPARC came up I figure it's a good
time to ask a few emulation/toolchain questions.

I'm interested in advice about how to build a native ELF userland, and
most importantly, toolchain for NetBSD SPARC.  Is there a relatively
painless way to do this?

On Mon, 3 Nov 1997, Jason Thorpe wrote:

> NetBSD does this whole thing with a thin emulation layer.  Native
> executables run under the "netbsd" emulation.  Writing the compatibility
> module is fairly straightforward.  Not much more difficult than duplicating
> all those constants and structures, really.  And it saves the maintanence
> nightmare of keeping all that duplicated information in synch.

Has anyone considered what's involved in emulating a NetBSD environment on
NetBSD.  Or rather, a different NetBSD environment on NetBSD.  I want to
switch to an SPARC elf64 format but still be able to run SPARC a.out
executables.

On a similar note, what is the significance of ARCH and MACHINE_ARCH?   I
remenber that the m68k ports has ARCH set to m68k and MACHINE_ARCH to the
particular machine type: sun3x, mac68k, amiga.  Most of the compilation is
based on ARCH; all the machine dependent arch directories seem to use
ARCH.  I want to use a different set of arch directories but maintain
compatibility.  

What I really want is some way to use a different arch, say sparc64, if it
exists, but default to the standard sparc arch if it doesen't. Is that
possible?  What would start to break if I switched to a sparc64 ARCH?  

P.S.  Anyone consider switching native NetBSD SPARC to elf executables?

=========================================================================
Eduardo Horvath				eeh@btr.com
"Cliffs are for climbing.  That's why God invented grappling hooks."
					- Benton Frasier