Re: NetBSD port-sparc on SparcStation Voyager

[der Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

>> Does anyone have any experience of running port-sparc on a Voyager?

Yes.  I have a Voyager and NetBSD is the only thing I run on it (so
far, at least).

My experience, for what it's worth, is that as far as software is
concerned it's Just Another SPARCstation - pretty much comparable to
the SS5 for CPU crunch etc.  This does of course call for a caveat: it
has things few other SPARCs, at least SPARC32s do, such as PCMCIA.
Most of them can be ignored if you're willing to give up the
corresponding functionality.

I'm using 1.4T plus some local hacks, the same as on all my SPARCs that
are capable of it.  (The Tadpole 3GX I've mentioned on-list a few times
is running 4.0.1, because 1.4T doesn't grok the hardware, and 4.0.1 is
sufficiently well integrated into my environment to be usable on it;
while it's suboptimal, it's not as bad as trying to backport all the
necessary hardware support to 1.4T would be.  I must admit a
temptation, though, to do the backport, if only just for all I'd learn
in the process.  Major lack: spare time.)

>> Unfortuately it seems to only have 16mb (at least I think it does),
>> will NetBSD work in this amount?
> It should do, though you might want to build a trim kernel.

Agreed - on both counts.  Do not expect to run anything even vaguely
bloated.  Self-hosting is probably out, for example, unless you're
really patient, though running an old release (like 1.4T :) will help
because its toolchain is significantly lighter weight.  Strictly
speaking, X should run fine, but today most people seem to confuse X
(which is a framework for building window systems) with certain
severely bloated window systems built atop X (such as Gnome), and the
latter have no hope of running in 16M, if they will even build on
anything but a "modern" multi-gigahertz multi-gigs-of-RAM Linux peecee.

My Voyager has 80M, I think, and I find that more than comfortable,
including self-hosting (1.4T+) and running X (the way I use it).  I
don't use it all that much, because the display is only 1024x768 (I
have the colour version), but it works fine.  I replaced the disk with
a laptop IDE drive behind a SCSI<->IDE adapter and as a result it has
some 4G of disk ("sd0: 4126 MB, [...] 8452080 sectors").

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