On Wed, Dec 03, 2014 at 05:54:14PM -0500, dev wrote: > > > We keep having this tail of zombie architectures. Long obsolete > > > hardware, run by few people, with pitiful "best effort" package > > > builds happening each release and with luck once between. They > > > slowly sink under the accumulating bitrot that nobody cares to fix, > > > but at the same time people can't bring themselves to completely > > > abandon those archs. *shrug* > > > <snip> > > I will dust off my ss20 this weekend see if it powers up. > > > > A SparcStation 20 is a relic for historical reference only. A cool > item and if it powers up I would be surprised. However it won't > make any more sense than to have a 1976 Ford truck as a daily > driver.
What you miss is that running on these architectures expose bugs that would otherwise not be found. Endianness issues, timing differences due to slower CPUs, alignment bugs, etc... And those bugs sometimes turn out to be MI bugs that affect all architectures. > > It would be a waste of effort to look at anything previous to a > Sun Fire V890 or any UltraSPARC IV based server. There are very > few out there running Solaris any more and only hobby types have > SPARC anywhere else. > > I ran OpenBSD 5.4 briefly on a small UltraSPARC Netra and it ran > very well. However I ran into issues trying to compile things. I > may look at OpenBSD again but really anything less than a modern > Niagara class UltraSparc would be wasted efforts I think. > > Dennis
