Gary Parker wrote:
> 
> I've been running Debian with a 2.4 kernel on an SS5 70MHz for a few months
> now as my home firewall/mail/web server and although a little slow it's been
> *way* more stable than any Intel kit I'd used before. I'm totally sold on
> Sun hardware now so decided to pick up an SS20 with 2x Ross HyperSPARC
> 150MHz in it off eBay (a bargain at 50UKP, I thought). All the 'official'
> Linux SMP Howtos and the Linux SPARC port website suggested there was no
> trouble with HyperSPARCs but it turned out that 2.4 was extremely unstable.
> Keith Weslowksi, the chap who'd been doing the majority of the Sparc32 port
> work on Linux has recently stepped away from the project for some reason and
> there simply doesn't appear to be anyone in the SPARC/Linux world with
> enough time or experience to get Sparc32 working again (2.6 is buggy as hell
> on Sparc64, from what I can tell and doesn't run Sparc32 or any form of SMP
> on Sparc at all at the moment).
> 

[Slightly offtopic:]

Sounds similar to the problems I had with SparcLinux. I gave up on it
when RedHat dropped their support for the Sparc family after RedHat 6.2,
which I had been using instead of NetBSD because it supported my Leo
24bit framebuffer. Around the time that RedHat started to limit
themselves to i386 platforms, David Miller stopped working on Sparc32.
Might be coincidence, but I understand that he was the main Sparc
maintainer, and a RedHat employee.

Several people suggested I try Debian instead, but the stable releases
were appalling to configure and both the testing snapshots I tried
wouldn't install. Then I read on several Linux mailing lists that 2.4
kernel releases didn't necessarily compile on anything other than i386.
I stuck an 8bit framebuffer into my SS5 and switched to NetBSD. Now
there's support for the Leo framebuffer in the upcoming NetBSD 2.0, so
I've got no reason to go back.

I still think Linux is a great Unix like operating system, but recent
emphasis on support for "high end" Intel machines seems to have been at
the expense of cross platform support. Desktop support has also
suffered. It used to be the case that Linux was a great performer on
lower spec PC's, but my 1.2Ghz laptop with NetBSD 2.0 runs rings around
a 2.4Ghz desktop with Fedora Core 2. (I made the mistake of pointing
this out on Slashdot, along with some supporting figures, boy did I get
flamed).

Chris