[Gllug] Debian on SPARC 64bit

Nix nix at esperi.demon.co.uk
Sat Jun 29 15:56:01 UTC 2002


On Fri, 28 Jun 2002, Paul Brazier spake:
> I've got the possibility of looking after a SPARC 64-bit server and
> ideally I'd like to have Debian on it for ease of maintenance. I've had
> a look at the Debian SPARC-64 pages and it seems that it is kind of
> working but maybe not too stable/complete.

There's no need to have your entire userspace be 64-bit. In fact except
for specialized hefty numeric-processing apps that *need* such things,
and the kernel, nothing should be 64-bit at all.  It's more
memory-hungry than 32-bit stuff and somewhat slower too (because the
code is larger).

Note that you *have* to use GCC-3.1 if you're building 64-bit userspace
stuff.

> Has anyone had experience of running this? - I've only ever used x86
> processor machines. 

This mail is being composed on a Netra T1 (that's an UltraSPARC II).
99.9% of its userspace is 32-bit (I've built 64-bit variants of octave,
GiNaC, CLN and such mathematical stuff).

> Might I be better off with Solaris even though I'd rather avoid it
> (being non-free and never having used it before)?

Well, if you can get the damn kernels to work, you're home free. vger
CVS kernels seem to work *much* better than the official Linus ones:
I've just tried to build 2.4.18-official here and got a bunch of
unresolved symbols... will try to 2.4.19rc1, then say sod it and go back
to the vger fold.

(Oh, and you need a specialized weird-ass ancient deformed egcs to
compile the kernels, too: GCC-3.1 would work, but the 2.4 kernels aren't
3.1-ready yet... feel free to try, though. The ancient deformed egcs
falls over in a heap if it's hit with floating-point stuff, but of
course that shouldn't be in the kernel at all so you're safe in that
one case.)

-- 
`What happened?'
                 `Nick shipped buggy code!'
                                             `Oh, no dinner for him...'


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