NetBSD/sparc64 Projects

This is a list of ongoing projects, or projects that are waiting for volunteers to pick them up.

Kernel

  • USIII: Support for UltraSparc III (and higher) CPUs and their PCI bridges needs to be written.
  • Sun4v: Support for T1000 and T2000 needs to be written.
  • Cleanup locore.s: Locore.s needs a cleanup.
  • KGDB: The code for kgdb needs to be fixed back up.
  • IOMMU: The iommu code may be a performance bottleneck. This needs to be investigated.

Drivers

Some drivers for hardware found in sparc64 machines are still missing:
  • floppy drive (for EBus based machines)
  • smart card reader (found in Blade/Netra systems)
  • environmental sensors (not really sparc64 specific)
  • console processor (to allow (a)lom configuration from within NetBSD)

Userland

  • We should provide bootloaders for non-ufsv1 filesystems.
  • We could build both sparc and sparc64 libraries and allow userland (and third party/pkgsrc) programs to be build as 32bit binaries.
  • Lots of pkgsrc software needs fixes for sparc64.
  • Some of the assembler routines used in our libraries use registers that they should not change, according to the ABI. This is a problem for example with CLISP. Careful review is needed.