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

[Alexander Jacocks]

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
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> rescue list - http://sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue_sunhelp.org
>>>
>>
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