Re: sun4v arch

Hi Peter,

There really isn't any magic to bringing up a port. You compile it,
install it, and then run it until it breaks. Once it breaks you spend
a lot of time instrumenting the code to track down what went wrong.
Then, depending on the amount of technical insight you have in to the
issue, you go through a number of iterations until it is fixed. Fixing
the pmap issue is "just" (notice the quotes) a matter of tracking down
the missing TLB shootdowns. For anyone who chooses pick this up it
will be very educational. It will also be very time consuming.


-Kip


On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 9:23 PM, Peter Jeremy
<peterjeremy_at_optushome.com.au> wrote:
> On 2008-Aug-23 22:40:55 -0500, Mark Linimon <linimon_at_lonesome.com> wrote:
>>My understanding is the the port is in a pre-alpha state due to unfinished
>>work in the kernel, so expecting there to be any userbase is premature.
>
> Except that the wiki gives a far more optimistic picture.
>
>>All of our 'new' architectures which are in this state have so few non-
>>developer users that there is hardly any reason to submit PRs.  AFAICT
>>the active developers already know what's missing :-)
>
> That makes it very difficult for someone outside that group to come up
> to speed.  I can't find anything in the freebsd-sun4v archvies.  I was
> hoping that there would be a list somewhere of what state various
> subsystems were in and what remained to be done.  wiki.freebsd.org
> sounds like the ideal place for this.
>
> On 2008-Aug-23 20:39:29 -0700, Garrett Cooper <yanefbsd_at_gmail.com> wrote:
>>Maybe some time should be spent looking at stuff from NetBSD to see
>>whether or not they've solved some already critical porting pieces
>>that FreeBSD lacks in this architecture?
>
> I can't find anything that suggests NetBSD runs on sun4v.  Their sparc64
> port only covers the US-I/II families and there's no mention of sun4v.
>
> --
> Peter Jeremy
> Please excuse any delays as the result of my ISP's inability to implement
> an MTA that is either RFC2821-compliant or matches their claimed behaviour.
>