[rescue] SunOS 4

[Romain Dolbeau]

Le sam. 4 janv. 2025 à 11:33, Chris Hanson via rescue
<rescue at sunhelp.org> a écrit :
> There’s a good reason Solaris was jokingly referred to as “Slowlaris.”

It wasn't really meant to run on sun4c hardware, you really want sun4m
or later for Solaris.

> At least as of 7.x, NetBSD was within 10% of SunOS performance on Sun SPARC hardware with sufficient RAM

Been running 9.0 on my systems, and it's quite usable on SS20-class
hardware. you wouldn't want to do "modern" tasks (e.g. bloated
websites that insist on using server-side rendering to display 3 lines
of text) on them, but otheiwse it's quite OK.

> If only it had the window system device support, SunOS binary compatibility would effectively make NetBSD a *real* “SunOS 5."

Recent NetBSD are supporting the cg6 (with some EXA acceleration) and
cg14 (with some EXA and XRender acceleration) quite well. Of curse
they are limited to analog output, though to an extent they can both
be coerced into higher resolutions than originally intended.

Or you can roll your own, the big benefits of a fully OSS and
supported OS :-) The "final" revision V1.3 of my SBusFPGA
(<https://github.com/MelkhiorVintageComputing/SBusFPGA>) includes an
onboard HDMI connector and can do 1920x1080 in 8/24 bits (for console
and X11), and has EXA and XRender acceleration using a RISC-V core in
the FPGA. It's a stupidly expensive and complex peripheral to put in
such an old system, but it does the job :-) USB support got broken
during an update and I haven't fixed it yet,but at one point I could
use a USB mouse & thumbdrive on the SS20 as well.

Cordially,

-- 
Romain Dolbeau