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

[Freya Fractal]

that would be, we suspect, slower than doing it on native hardware. We 
have native hardware, but it's a Sun Blade 150. We're not just looking 
for a SPARC64 machine at all, we're looking for a better one so builds 
don't take a thousand years.

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
>     <http://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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>>
>>
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>
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