Riccardo Mottola wrote: > Hi, > > Gregory Edigarov wrote: > > if I want to build a non-wintel system with commodity running OpenBSD > > without problems, what are my options?
The only live architectures besides AMD64 are ARM and MIPS64 routers. I have also heard of RISC-V and OpenRISK but have never seen the hardware in real life. OpenBSD supports MIPS64 router hardware via octeon port http://www.openbsd.org/octeon.html Please see caveats by searching this mailing list for example for EdgeRouter LITE. ARM-based devices, such as BeagleBone, BeagleBoard, PandaBoard ES, SABRE Lite, Nitrogen6x and Wandboard will be supported by armv7 port. http://www.openbsd.org/armv7.html Presumably Bitrig fork of OpenBSD has somewhat better support at the moment for ARM based devices. > > preferably something non-apple also, which i will be able to connect > > display, mouse, and keyboard, and hopefully run X, etc. Apple uses Intel hardware for a long time :) > > since we don't have Raspberry support, then your choice for reasonable Who are we? Raspberry PI is a pile of proprietary firmware. > (albeit almost all obsolete) platform restricts to ultra-sparc (old > sparcs are fun, but slow by any means and also the CPU support is for > OpenBSD hit and miss... 2 of my SparcStations are unstable), PPC (some Sparc (old 32-bit SUN hardware from late 80s), Sparc64, sgi, alpha, macppc are all vintage architectures. You apparently never run OpenBSD on Sparc64 hardware since otherwise you would know that OpenBSD support for Sparc64 was only second to Solaris. OpenBSD is the only operating system other than Solaris which support UltraSPARC IV/T1/T2 and Fujitsu SPARC64-V/VI/VII chip-sets. That was the favorite hardware of OpenBSD developers before it died circa 2004. Sun Blade 2500 gray was the last and the greatest. I gave mine to somebody last Summer. Too much noise and electricity. It was not worthy for a guy who doesn't make living by writing a code (Nice Big-endian machine). > Amiga boards, older Macs) and... nothing else. PA-RISC is fun, but I > never tried X there. > And, if you think, the only other machines that could do are Itanium and > > Alpha. > Amiga :) Dude we are talking some late 80s stuff here when I was young. > > For most of these, you will notice that base OpenBSD stuff works pretty > well (as does NetBSD and to a lesser degree Linux) but several bigger > application prove quite buggy! Browsers, mail clients.. everything is > tested on i386/amd64 only. NetBSD Sparc64 port was in the sorry state comparing to OpenBSD. On the top of it NetBSD has been relaying on the cross compiling for a long, long time. At this point one has to wonder whether NetBSD can really run on anything else than amd64. Last time I looked they didn't have native software package builds for anything else than amd64. On the top of it all last year during the series of interviews with OpenBSD and NetBSD conducted by a Polish guy the most revealing thing was that not a single NetBSD guy used NetBSD at work and even worse most guys run NetBSD only in the virtual environment on their private hardware. In sharp contrast all OpenBSD developers who were interviewed run large OpenBSD deployments at work and used OpenBSD as the only OS on their private hardware (you have to eat your own dog food). > SPARC and PPC seem to me more crashy when bad programming happens, which > > is actually a good thing and a reason to keep computing diversity alive. > > But I fear it will become worse, the only thing that has a chance is ARM > > which is used little-endian. Or embedded PPC, which is used also LE. Big > > Endian will perhaps not even taught at school in 10+ years. > > On Linux I have Firefox running on PPC, but I read that others have > issues with it on non-intel. Be prepared to find more bugs than usual. > We at GNUstep take quite some care that things work on PPC, SPARC and > ARM, but because I love them :) > With exception of ARM you are talking about vintage hardware. OP was asking about new commodity hardware. Cheers, Predrag > Riccardo
