>> have a few newbie questions:
>>
>> 1) how much one could expect from this port.. i mean how stable it is

I'm using a basically vanilla 1.5 on an Ultra 5+.  I've made as few changes
as I can, because any post-1.5 kernel I tried had such serious SCSI and
HME (Ethernet) problems that I simply couldn't use it.  NetBSD 1.4.3 on a
non-Ultra this ain't.  (Yet  (-: )

> Except for some userlevel programs (ntpd and dhclient so far) I've had good
> success running the system the same as any other NetBSD system.

The 3 main ones I've encountered so far are "xntpd", "xfs" (the X font
server) and trying to run the Acrobat 4.0 "acroread" binary under Solaris
emulation is not working for me.  (I also can't seem to get SunOS 4.x
binaries to run either, even though I have the "netbsd32_compat15-1.0" and
"netbsd32-compat14-1.0" packages installed, and "/emul/sunos" and
"/emul/svr4" seem to be populated correctly, at least according to their
respective man pages ... I wonder what I'm doing wrong)

The only other nagging problem is that occasionally I'll drop Ethernet frames,
and (more problematic) the machine will just drop into DDB sometimes - a "co"
will usually right it back up again, although sometimes it just panics.

>> 2) what's all that "tricks" with gcc for sparc64? and shared libraries
> 
> The in-tree gcc won't work for sparc64 so you'll need to grab a current
> snapshot from ftp.netbsd.org:/pub/NetBSD/arch or cross compile one from
> gnu/dist/toolchain.

If you want/need to run vanilla 1.5, at a minimum you need to get

	ftp://ftp.NetBSD.ORG/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-1.5/patches/sparc64-compfix.tgz

and install it.

Then the next thing I'd do is grab the current "awk" source (really "gawk")
and build it.  Without a working "(g)awk" your builds of other programs
(like, uh, Perl 5.6.0) will fail in mysterious ways.  You will soon become
conversant in the phrase "-msoft-quad-float", young Jedi.  :-)

In short, I'd call it "fairly stable", not as stable as I'd like, but it's
young and it will get there in due time.  It's been pretty good about staying
up for me, now that I've found my own quasi-stable setup for it.  Kudos to
Eduardo, mrg, pk and the rest for getting it this far!

	- Greg