[haiku-development] [rfc] OS.h Architecture zoo

  • From: chase rayfield <cusbrar2@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Wed, 22 Jan 2014 09:48:31 -0800 (PST)

Why not throw SPARC in there for the heck of it? It is a good solid 
architecture that has a few flaws but overall has aged pretty well. Oracle and 
Fujitsu have kept it on life support as well.. so fairly fast servers with 
PCI-E and fast disk drives are not hard to find as they come out of service.

I'm not so sure SPARC is completely out of the running just yet... many old 
SPARC_32 machines sport engouh ram to run Haiku and are fairly simple with for 
their time high end IO subsystems. I happen to own a very nice SS20 with dual 
SM81s and a 147Gb disk plenty to run Haiku. 


While on the other hand SPARC_64 is more PC like owing to having PCI-E nowadays 
so things like graphics cards can be added to what would otherwise be server 
machines. A good example being my Sun T2000 ... I know there are some people 
interested in Sparc support myself and the occasional person pops up interested 
in getting the cross-compiler built.

For Sparc you want to built 32bit and 64bit kernels. Sun4m and Leon3+ are the 
only 32bit architectures worth supporting Sun4d is also interesting but lacks 
documentation and stable code on other OSes.  A complete 32bit userland and 
optionally a partial 64bit userland for applications that benefit from it 
(OpenSSL OpenSSH etc...). Old Sun hardware is not hard to get its about as easy 
to get a hold of as old 68K Macintosh hardware. QEMU also has good emulators 
for 32bit systems which have recently been improved drastically. Sparc also 
shares heritage with the PPC port since both use similar firmware.


There are other reasons for Sparc also... its open, Leon Sparc and OpenSparc 
are open source and it can be tailors for varying workloads. Leon and OpenSparc 
are tailored for embedded and highly threaded work respectively which goes to 
demonstrate the flexibility of the architecture. SuperSparc and HyperSparc were 
also high throughput workstation architectures that were quite good at the 
time. Sparc is also seen quite often in academia in various projects like 
RAMP-Gold, Sparc also has as coprocessor support built into the instruction set 
which could lend itself to use with FPGAs for accelerating various things.


Machines I have that could in theory run Haiku:
LX 50Mhz 128Mb ram 2Gb disk.
SS10 60Mhz 384Mb dual 2Gb disks
SS20 dual 85Mhz single 147Gb disk (this machine is faster than you'd think)

Ultra 1E 167Mhz 128Mb ram 10Gb disk (quite decent I've ran Redhat 6 on it and 
fixed up FLTK to work on it)

The support the above machines would require a CG6 driver for basic graphics, 
Serial driver for keyboard and debugging its a Zilog chip hanging off an 8 bit 
bus. The Ultra one has a different serial chip than the other ones.

Sun Ultra 10 440Mhz   PCI

Sun Blade 100 600Mhz PCI
Sun T2000 8 1.2Ghz cores 32 hardware threads 32Gb ram. Low profile PCI-E 2.x

Linux, NetBSD and OpenBSD all maintain Sparc ports.. and 32bit code can be 
compiled on a faster 64bit machine which is the norm. So, power isn't all that 
huge of an issue like it would be for some architectures like VAX or Alpha 
which really are dead and require running many machines to build anything in a 
reasonable amount of time. So a Sparc port of Haiku isn't too likely but I 
think it would be fun :P I'd like to help even if I had someone to brainstorm 
things with. Its too easy to get stuck attempting things like this alone.


Chase Rayfield - cb88 

Other related posts: