Hi James! > On Oct 8, 2015, at 9:44 AM, James Morris <[email protected]> wrote: > > FYI, > > Oracle developers have been working on Sparc Linux (as some may have noticed > from lkml commits). We've just made an initial cut of this available > publicly, for the purposes of sharing it with the wider community.
This is awesome, thank you! I was actually wondering why there was apparently no public activity from Oracle and Fujitsu regarding SPARC despite them still selling SPARC-related hard- and software. > See https://oss.oracle.com/projects/linux-sparc/ > > There are some mailing lists, a git repo, installable distro etc. Superb! > I hope that some of this work will be useful to the Debian project, and > please feel free to provide us with feedback. Absolutely. What should be on top of the priority list is fixing binutils and gcc for SPARC. We had two rather nasty bugs in binutils [1] and [2]. While [1] has recently been fixed, thanks to Michael Karcher's excellent debugging skills, we still have [2] which needs to be fixed. It would be awesome if one of the SPARC experts at Oracle could take a look and use the reduced test case, that was again provided by Michael Karcher, to help fix the issue. There is also another gcc bug which prevents us from using multi-arch (32-bit on 64-bit SPARC), but I haven't reported that one yet. Will follow up shortly. I think it should also be in Oracle's and Fujitsu's interests to get the toolchain with binutils and gcc fixed on SPARC as I assume these are also used internally for development. I will send an email to Debian FTP and the Buildd principal admins to ask them to ask SPARC (32 bit) back to ports, also citing your mail which proves there is still upstream support for SPARC. Thanks a lot for your mail! Adrian > [1] https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=18855 > [2] https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=19019
