Gentoo on Sparc (32-bit)

chris_andrew · Posted: Mon Jul 23, 2007 4:01 pm Post subject: Gentoo on Sparc (32-bit)

Hi, all.

This seemed like an appropriate place for this post, I apologise if I am wrong.

I am trying to unite people behind the 32-bit sparc banner. Support is fading, and many people will probably turn to *BSD.

Can I ask everyone to have a look at this Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparc32_linux_distributions, and add anything they feel appropriate and constructive.

Many thanks.

Cheers,

Chris.

gust4voz · Posted: Mon Jul 23, 2007 6:01 pm Post subject:

Please stop duplicating posts, that won't bring sparc32 back to life.
First and foremost sparc32 needs a kernel maintainer, i.e. someone that knows the hardware, has the hardware, knows linux internals and cares about it in the form of doing low-level work on the kernel to get it to behave on said hardware.
Then and only then the userland can be revived, which will require more people with more hardware to test/fix. Otherwise it's just aiming for problems in the dark and on painfully slow machines.
Hardware getting older and broken doesn't help, and yeah someone will say "but there are tons of spares on ebay" to which i'll answer "which are getting older and broken too". And for which there's no trusty method of testing either.
If you wanna have fun coding/hacking for them then take up the task - crying like a baby "hey i want sparc32 without doing anything" won't bring it back, we are unpaid volunteers and very few at that too.
There are a lot of challenges waiting out there, maybe no one wants to take up this one because they just see it's not too useful. It's old hardware, it's breaking down and the architecture is almost dead (there's LEON embedded sparc32 but that's a different beast altogether).
_________________
Gustavo Zacarias
Gentoo/SPARC monkey

chris_andrew · Posted: Mon Jul 23, 2007 6:13 pm Post subject:

Thanks for your abusive post, it really achieved a lot!

gust4voz · Posted: Mon Jul 23, 2007 6:20 pm Post subject:

How's a reality check abusive?
Did i insult anyone?
Did i moderate you off?
I'm just stating the fact that if someone were interested in getting sparc32 back to some useful degree it would have happened already.
Otherwise it seems to me that you just want for someone else to do it for you...
_________________
Gustavo Zacarias
Gentoo/SPARC monkey

chris_andrew · Posted: Mon Jul 23, 2007 6:27 pm Post subject:

chris_andrew · Posted: Mon Jul 23, 2007 6:31 pm Post subject:

BTW, I'm an unpaid volunteer too (at gNewsense), and I spend a lot of time making contributions. Just because I can't code, it doesn't mean I'm unable to contribute.

gust4voz · Posted: Mon Jul 23, 2007 7:16 pm Post subject:

Sure, but in this case it's coders that are needed, everything else is pointless at this time.
What do you want to do otherwise? Document how it doesn't work right?
As davem (the one and lonely sparc64 linux kernel maintainer) said "stop banging on distro maintainers and get a kernel maintainer" with respect to sparc32 support.
This kind of stuff doesn't help really, we are barely 2 active developers handling sparc64 stuff and it's not enough to handle the workload.
It seems people behave like leeches lately, wanting everything free, 100% supported and with no effort on their part.
Sun sparc32 boxes are a museum piece these days, not very useful, slow and power-hoging machines. Hell, they're 13+ year-old boxes (that being the latest sparc32, the SS20). Anyone running a Pentium/60 around? Because that's circa the same era as the SS20 if you were bleeding edge (otherwise some i486).
The best use for a sparc32 box these days it to see how operating systems were back then, running and old solaris or some old linux.
So get over it.
_________________
Gustavo Zacarias
Gentoo/SPARC monkey

i-right-i · Posted: Mon Jul 23, 2007 10:58 pm Post subject:

The fact that you made one thread regarding this subject, then when you didn't get the answer you want, you make another thread is why you annoyed people like Gus. The fact that Gus reality checked you was in fact your own fault for making repeating threads. Just about any user forum would give you some heartache for doing that.

Having said that, I would agree with Gus on the whole Sparc32 thing. It's dead, time to move on. Gentoo has always tried to cater to the Sparc community. I think they do a very good job. At some point you have to say enough is enough. Two Years ago I was a complete slowaris shop, now I am a complete Gentoo shop with the exception of a few machines and thats not by choice but because I have to due to vendor requirements needing java support. I am getting ready to retire some old Sparc64 stuff, I couldn't imagine maintaining Sparc32 machines. It would be just plain nuts. And seriously, what would they be good for?

~i-right-i
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