On Sun, 2006-10-01 at 11:29 +0200, Andreas Jaeger wrote:
> "Alexey Eremenko" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> 
> > Actually, openSUSE is very good OS and is more convenient than Solaris.
> >
> > So if you have powerful multi-CPU SPARC Server and want a convenient OS,
> > openSUSE is the only way to go.
> >
> > This way you can reutilize Sun Servers as Linux Workstations or Servers.
> >
> > But this would require a very serious rebuild of the whole distro.
> >
> > Question:
> > How much time it would require for 1 Linux expert to port all openSUSE from
> > x86 to SPARC ? (including installer & full FTP repository) provided he know
> > both architectures & works full-time.
> 
> It's not that easy to give any timeframe.  It depends on various
> issues, so let me give some commands based on my work getting SUSE
> Linux running on x86-64.
> 
> The challenge is getting the base system running:
> * gcc
> * glibc
> * binutils
> * kernel
> 
> The problem is that in these projects only a few folks take care of
> SPARC.  I do not know whether current versions of these do run at all.
> 
> >
> > 1 week, 1 month, 1 year ?
> 
> If the above is done, there are two challenges:
> * packages
> * yast changes
> 
> yast changes should be only partitioning and booting, the rest should
> be generic.  So, this is is something of a few weeks.
> 
> With packages it's lots of time to rebuild everything (bootstrap) and
> fix problems.  Since we already support i386, x86-64, ppc, ppc64,
> s390, s390x and ia64 most of the problems where packages are not
> portable (endianness, 64-bit) should be fixed already.  The problems
> arise when packages are failing through the build.  This is initially
> quite often a problem in the toolchain but could also be a
> non-portable package.  So, this needs somebody that can debug bugs at
> a low level and fix them.  If somebody has these skills, this is
> something of a few person months.

> 
> Andreas


Hi Andreas,

I would hope that the real core basis (gcc, glib, binutils, kernel) were
already sorted out for the old SuSE-sparc-port (rel 7.0...7.3)
But at that time, not everything was "open" afair.

If i'm not mistaken, "icecream" was able to cross-compile (for sparc,
HP-PA etc). Is there any docu, HOW2 for that?
It might speed-up the work that needs to be done...

If there is a minimal installation, that can perform "an install or
upgrade" from externally build packages, it would be easily for the
community to add the rest.

Hans
-- 
pgp-id: 926EBB12
pgp-fingerprint: BE97 1CBF FAC4 236C 4A73  F76E EDFC D032 926E BB12
Registered linux user: 75761 (http://counter.li.org)
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Reply via email to