NetBSD/sparc 1.2

NetBSD/sparc 1.2 was the third formal release of NetBSD/sparc.

NetBSD/sparc is based on work done at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory by the Computer Systems Engineering group under DARPA contract BG 91-66, which later appeared in the 4.4BSD-Lite distribution from the University of California, Berkeley. It was imported into the NetBSD source tree on October 2, 1993. Special thanks are extended to the LBL Computer Systems Engineering group for their work. Without it, the port would not exist.

Paul Kranenburg was the maintainer of NetBSD/sparc at the time of the 1.2 release.

Supported Hardware

The following hardware is supported by NetBSD/sparc:

CPUs:
- sun4m machines: Classic, LX, SS4, SS5, SS10, SS20. Note: SS10s and SS20s that have a processor module without an external cache (`Supercache') are not yet supported.
- sun4c machines: SS1, SS1+, SS2, IPC, ELC, IPX, and SLC
- sun4 machines: 4/100, 4/200, and 4/300
- Some sun4c-compatable "clones" are rumored to work
SCSI interfaces:
- NCR53c9x-based on-board and Sbus SCSI interface (esp) on sun4m, sun4c, and 4/300 systems (on-board only on 4/300)
- NCR5380-based VME SCSI interface (si). Interrupt driven and polled DMA function on the si.
- NCR5380-based on-board SCSI interface on 4/100 (sw). Polled DMA now works on the sw. Interrupt driven DMA does not currently work.
Disks:
- most SCSI disks and CD-ROMs
- SMD disks connected to Xylogics 753/7053 (xd) or Xylogics 450/451 (xy) VME controllers
- built-in floppy drive on sun4c systems
Tape drives:
- most SCSI tape drives
Serial interfaces:
- built-in Zilog 8530 serial ports
Network interfaces:
- on-board and Sbus LANCE ethernet found on sun4m, sun4c, and 4/300 (on-board only on 4/300)
- on-board and VME/multibus Intel ethernet found on sun4 systems
Framebuffers:
- on-board and Sbus bwtwo. bwtwo driver also supports attaching a bwtwo instance to the overlay plane of P4 cgfour and P4 cgeight framebuffers.
- VME cgtwo
- Sbus cgthree
- Sbus cgsix
- P4 framebuffers found on 4/100 and 4/300 systems: bwtwo, cgfour, cgsix, and cgeight. Note: cgeight support is not well tested.
Input devices:
- Sun keyboard and mouse
Miscellaneous:
- on-board audio on sun4c systems

If you have a device that's not listed, it might be compatible with something else, or we might have simply forgotten it. If all else fails, maybe you could write a driver!

Major items often asked about, but not yet supported include:

sun4u and sun4d-class CPUs
audio on sun4m machines

The NetBSD/sparc port features extensive binary compatibility with SunOS 4.1.x programs. Statically linked SunOS executables will run with minimal setup. To run dynamiclly linked executables, you'll need to provide the shared libraries that came with your SunOS installation. See NetBSD's compat_sunos(8) manual page for more details. SunOS programs that will not work include those that use the SunOS kvm library, certain (low-level) disk manipulation utilities, and programs making explicit use of Sun's STREAMS subsystem.

If you're interested in NetBSD/sparc you should use a more recent version.

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