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    SubjectRe: Old platforms: bring out your dead
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    Hello!

    On 1/11/21 3:55 PM, chase rayfield wrote:
    > My take is that there *would* be more interest in Sparc sun4m / Sun4d
    > from enthusiasts at the very least if it was possible to actually boot
    > the bloat hog that is Linux these days in a fully usable configuration
    > that probably means some modifications to SILO and Linux required.

    The Linux kernel is configurable. If you want a small kernel, then just
    configure one. No one expects you to boot a fully-fledged distribution
    kernel on these machines.

    > The problem is as I understand it, SILO only sets up a 16Mb mapping
    > (either due to having to assume 4MB minimum dram stick size or due to
    > mapping limitations not sure, most of these machines have at least
    > 16MB in slot one...these days though that wasn't the case for sun4c),
    > loads Linux into it and says good Luck. This isn't enough for a modern
    > kernel with any hardware support built in. So you might for instance
    > get a kernel to fit but only if you dropped all of networking support
    > etc...

    That makes no sense. It worked in the past, why shouldn't it work nowadays?

    As I said, you disable everything you don't need. I'm booting my SH-7785LCR
    SuperH board with a kernel that is less than 4 MB in size and which includes
    everything I need.

    > I'm guessing the fix for this would be to modify silo to map a
    > larger amount in a way that Linux expects so it can remap it as it
    > likes, or just have SILO map the full memory as Linux would. Anyway
    > that is THE main demotivation for these architectures.... otherwise
    > they have plenty of ram and performance to do basic router/server
    > tasks sans SSL.

    Or just configure a smaller kernel.

    > This has been the status quo for since the last of the 2.6 series of
    > kernels which it was still possible to just barely squeeze a usable
    > kernel out of... If someone wanted to take a few hours and fix this
    > issue, and keep these architectures around I'd be happy to "buy them a
    > round of pizza", though I recognize that many people that work on this
    > already have nice jobs, and just don't have time.

    I haven't gotten around to setup my SPARCstation 5 yet, but I will certainly
    going to do that later this year to give it a try.

    > Also Sparc would probably be a good project for someone to extend/test
    > Andi Keen's Linux LTO patch set so we could reduce the kernel binary
    > size that way also even if sun4 architectures are dropped, it would
    > still be useful for embedded sparc. Also there is a port of Temlib to
    > the Mister hardware now, 3 cores roughly equivalent to a mid 90s
    > machine, at least 128MB ram is possible ( more if a way to map the ARM
    > system memory also 1GB is available there, it would have higher
    > latency though).
    >
    > It is perfectly viable to build Sparc v7 or v8 32bit binaries in a
    > chroot on a fast machine also, and I would recommend this if you wish
    > to retain sanity rather than attempting cross compiler voodoo, unless
    > that is your thing.

    We build anything SPARC on a SPARC T5 that we have for Debian, no need
    for cross-compilation and that machine is actually quite fast.

    Adrian

    --
    .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
    : :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
    `. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
    `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

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