[rescue] Looking for SUN4U/SUN4V machines for a porting project

Tue Jun 3 01:03:46 EDT 2025

Root?  Just create a container/zone in which you have root inside the zone and you will be set!

It works really well and has since Solaris 10 beta b69...  almost 2 decades ago!

--Patrick

----- Original Message -----
From: "Freya Fractal via rescue" <rescue at sunhelp.org>
To: "Alexander Jacocks" <jjacocks at gmail.com>, "The Rescue List" <rescue at sunhelp.org>
Cc: "Freya Fractal" <freya at highenergymagic.net>
Sent: Saturday, May 31, 2025 10:02:44 PM GMT -06:00 US/Canada Central
Subject: Re: [rescue] Looking for SUN4U/SUN4V machines for a porting project

gods that would be ideal. We're in NZ, and NZ never liked Sun gear. We have access to the gcc buildfarm, but we don't have root on those and we need root for what we're doing. Are there any packages that folks on this list would like to see for Solaris 10 SPARC? Right now we're currently rebuilding GCC, after we made a stupid mistake. We will be shipping: 
gcc (FractalKit release 25.5.0) 9.5.0 (kdsp-sol210-9_5-branch+fractal_rpath) 
On 5/31/2025 19:59, Alexander Jacocks wrote: 

Too bad that there's no economical way to ship to Australia from the USA. I have some sun4v hosts available freely for free software porting. 

- Alex 

On Sat, May 31, 2025 at 5:26 PM Freya Fractal via rescue < rescue at sunhelp.org > wrote: 

ah. update: that Solaris 10 image.... boots, yes. but if we're right it is read-only and networking doesn't work. significantly less than ideal 
On 5/31/2025 11:10, Patrick Giagnocavo wrote: 

It may sound heretical but you can use the QEMU emulator to emulate a Niagara CPU and then run your selected version of Solaris on that. 

See for instance the info about the Niagara CPU booting Solaris 10, bottom of the table: 

https://wiki.qemu.org/Documentation/Platforms/SPARC 

I bet giving it 16GB RAM would be a way to test out your build process, provided you have a x64 system with 24-32GB. 

—Patrick 

On Fri, May 30, 2025 at 11:51 PM Freya Fractal < freya at highenergymagic.net > wrote: 

not as yet, no. we own highenergymagic.net , but we hadn't put up anything there about it as-yet, mostly because it's only now that we're really taking it seriously. It originally started as just us seeing if things would compile, and expanded massively... we later realised that we had broken the build in such a way that it is highly likely that many of the important packages would have undesired links to libraries (many of them 32-bit) in /opt/csw, which is suboptimal, as the intent of this package is that it is able to be installed on a clean Solaris 10u11 1/13 system. If proof is required of what we have created, we are able to provide the copy of FractalKit that we archived when we started the project over, but be aware that it's an organically expanding mess, none of the binaries and packages are signed and much of the porting was done in a very inexperienced manner. The current plan for FractalKit 25 is to build everything 64-bit clean, with no links to OpenCSW libraries, with signed ELF binaries and each component offered as a signed SVR4 package datastream. extended goals are to distribute this as an ISO image that can be burnt to a DVD and can be installed alongside Solaris at the "install additional software" step of the installer, if we can figure out how the Solaris installer expects the DVD's hierarchy to be arranged. 

On 5/30/2025 21:43, Patrick Giagnocavo via rescue wrote: 

I can't find anything about your project on the web; do you have a website? 

On Fri, May 30, 2025 at 11:12 PM Freya Fractal via rescue < rescue at sunhelp.org > wrote: 

Hiya, 

Like the subject line says. We're looking to see if anyone in 
NZ/Australia has a SPARC (sun4u/sun4v) machine they'd be willing to 
donate to the FractalKit project. FractalKit is a collection of modern 
packages for Solaris 10/11 on SPARC, covering web servers (Nginx 1.28, 
Apache 2.4.62), security (OpenSSL 3.4.0, GnuTLS 3.7), shell utilities 
(coreutils 9.5, bash 5.3, zsh 5.9), tcsh), programming languages (PHP 
8.4.1, Ruby 3.2.3, Perl 5.40.0, python 3.13), libraries and development 
tools (too many to list), compilers (GCC 9.5.0 C, C++, fortran, 
objective C), databases (SQLite 3.44.3, PostgreSQL 15.8, MariaDB if we 
can get it to build), editors (nano 8.4, vim 9.1), and replacements for 
network-facing services (primarily OpenSSH) that need to be kept 
up-to-date, especially for those lacking MOS/Sunsolve access. we're 
currently rebuilding the entire project from scratch after realising we 
made some fatal errors, but we can send, on request, the full previous 
build of FractalKit as a demonstration. However, we've run into a 
problem: The only SPARC machine we have is a Sun Blade 150, with a 
650MHz UltraSPARC-IIe, 768MiB of ram, and an IDE hard disk. Does it 
compile things? Yes. Does it also take in excess of 24 hours to build 
something like gcc? also yes. So we're looking for a bit of SPARC kit, 
preferably SUN4V, that one of yall lovely entities would be willing to 
send to us to help advance the project. 

Thank you in advance, 

Freya 

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