This page contains information about porting FreeBSD to UltraSPARC systems.
9 October, 2001: Jake Burkholder and +
3 March, 2002 : A bootable ISO image is + now available for installing FreeBSD/sparc64 onto a supported + system. Please see the freebsd-sparc mailing list for more + information. The ISO image is available here.
26 February, 2002 : David O'Brien has + posted a working self-hosted sparc64 toolchain. You may + download the archive file + here. Untar it in /.
9 October, 2001 : Jake Burkholder and Thomas Moestl have been porting FreeBSD to the UltraSparc for the past few months and first booted a machine into single user mode on the 18th of October. The log from the serial console can be found here.
The FreeBSD/sparc64 platform port was initiated by Jason Evans in 1997. Originally, the port was backed by Sun Microelectronics. Sun Microelectronics (SME) is the part of Sun that makes microprocessors. Up until now, SMCC (the part of Sun that makes workstations) has been the overwhelmingly primary customer of SME. SME naturally wants to expand its sales, and to do that, they need to sell CPUs to people outside of Sun. FreeBSD was perceived as being a way of accomplishing this.
To understand why Sun could fund a FreeBSD port, which would seem to conflict with Sun's Solaris offerings, you need to realize that Sun is broken up into separate business units that often compete with each other. The Solaris people at Sun may not like having a FreeBSD port to compete with, but their power to prevent it is somewhat diminished due to the business model. Of course, if the FreeBSD port were a major threat, SMI (the main Sun umbrella company) would put a stop to it. However, this is unlikely, since FreeBSD mostly meets the needs of a different market sector than Solaris. Solaris does wonderful things on big MP servers. FreeBSD is fast and lean for small servers. It is also useful for certain types of embedded applications, which is actually the main reason SME is interested in seeing a port of FreeBSD to UltraSPARC.
A while back, SME approached the FreeBSD core team and offered monetary compensation of some nature in exchange for an official UltraSPARC port. The core team turned down this offer. The exact reasons are known only to the core team, but Jordan Hubbard implied taht SME's offer was not of major interest since to be of long term use to FreeBSD, such a proposal would need to include support for a number of years from someone internal to Sun.
Jason Evans started working at SME in September of 1997. During the first week, he caught wind of the negotiations SME was making with the core team. Jason expressed extreme interest in working on the project. Through a bit of persistence (and the failure of the proposal made by SME), he was given permission to begin work on the port.
Jason's other duties SME included finding information for software vendors who are porting their OSes/RTOSes to the UltraSPARC. This put him in a good position to gather hardware information pertinent to the FreeBSD port.
Jason was instrumental in getting the FreeBSD/sparc64 port done, and doing much of the initial planning. Sun Microsystems has since backed out of their support for the FreeBSD/sparc64 effort, and Jason Evans eventually left Sun.
Paolo Di Francesco was the next "father" of the port. Paolo attempted, for the first time in the history of the port, to organize information, developers, and tasks into a structure that can only be known as project management. If not for the 98-99 holiday season and a few overspoken individuals on the mailing list, Paolo would have continued on. During his tenure, a number of people stepped up to work on the older Sun SPARC architectures. This did cause a slight chasm in the project, and many of the more qualified individuals were on the side of the UltraSPARC family of machines. Luckily, this didn't end up a period of quiet on the mailing list, as Telecom Italia provided us with a list keep-alive. A glitch in their system caused one of Paolo's posts to keep coming back and back and back and back... This repeat post continued well into 1999, when the list did once again become mostly silent.
In 2000, Jake Burkholder and Thomas Moestl have made an incredible amount of work on the sparc port. Most of the development has taken place in the Perforce repository on freefall, and has only been merged to the HEAD (-CURRENT branch) of CVS after more careful testing. David O'Brien has done a lot of work to provide a usable toolchain for FreeBSD/sparc64 development. Until one of the above mentioned people updates this paragraph, please see the mailing list archives. ;)
It's right here. The old FAQ is SME-centeric, and sun4u-specific. These traits do not reflect the current state of the port, since SME has pulled their official support from the port and the majority of the development equipment now consists of older Sun SPARC hardware. Furthermore, there haven't been a lot of frequently asked questions of late. Most of the items in the old FAQ date back to before the mailing list was being archived.
It is possible to boot a number of newer UltraSparc hardware platforms into FreeBSD with time and patience. Please see the FreeBSD/sparc64 Hardware Notes for more information.
Please see the FreeBSD/sparc64 Hardware Notes for more information.
See question #3.
It is reasonable to say that FreeBSD/sparc64 will provide some Solaris/SunOS emulation. It is too early in the life of the port to answer this any more specifically.
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