[rescue] Looking for SUN4U/SUN4V machines for a porting project
Freya Fractal
freya at highenergymagic.net
Sat May 31 23:02:44 EDT 2025
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
>> <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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