On February 9, Eduardo E. Horvath wrote:
> >   I don't mind running it in 32bit mode...I just want it *running*.  A friend
> > is over here hacking, trying to get the sparc64 kernel built from -current
> > sources as of a couple of days ago.  He's cussing a lot and banging his fists on
> > the desk; I'm afraid to ask him how it's going. :)  Any pointers on the
> > specifics?  I live and breathe Sun hardware all day and all night, but I've
> > never touched an Ultra because I don't want to soil my soul with Slowlaris.
> 
> I'm surprised he's having so much trouble.  I recently cross-compiled
> a kernel on an x86 box and it worked quite well.  I'll attach a copy
> of my /etc/mk.conf.  The only important thing is to make sure that the
> assembler groks V9 instructions and spits out v8plusa format binaries.
> I believe that the in-tree toolchain is capable of doing that.
> 
> Also, DO NOT enable COMPAT_NETBSD32 on a 32-bit kernel.  It's for
> 64-bit kernels only and simply won't work.
> 
> Let's see, what else?  Oh, yeah.  The kernel needs to be 4MB aligned
> to run since it's mapped in by a single 4MB page.  The kernel is
> intelligent enough to determine that it's not 4MB aligned and relocate
> itself if needed, but it seems that some versions of the OBP do not
> support changing an existing mapping and the kernel does not boot.  I
> just placed a new ofwboot in:
> 
> ftp.netbsd.org:/pub/NetBSD/arch/sparc64/other/ofwboot
> 
> which should fix this problem.

  Ok, I will try that stuff.  I may have time to do so tonight.
Thanks for the advice!

> I hope it doesn't need to come to that 8^).  But make sure that it's a
> 170 with esp/le/cgsix and not a 17E with fas/hme/ffb since there are
> no drivers for fas and ffb, and I don't know how well the hme driver
> works.

  It's definitely the former...I'll give it a shot and let you know
how I make out.  Thanks again!


            -Dave McGuire