"Alexey Eremenko" 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. Now comes the challenge: Everything above is with a non-moving target. Factory is moving forward every day, so a new toolchain and new packages come in - and you have to keep up with that and fix issues that arise if you rebuild with new packages. This is a couple of hours a week - and for rebuilding you need some disk space and lots of CPU power... Andreas -- Andreas Jaeger, aj@suse.de, http://www.suse.de/~aj/ SUSE Linux Products GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F FED1 389A 563C C272 A126

Hans Witvliet writes:

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.

Those glibc, gcc, binutils and kernel versions are old. For example you do not want gcc 2.95 but gcc 4.1 nowadays. So much has changed that it's basically starting from scratch.

If i'm not mistaken, "icecream" was able to cross-compile (for sparc, HP-PA etc). Is there any docu, HOW2 for that?

Yes, icecream can do this. I don't know about docu for this.

It might speed-up the work that needs to be done...

Definitely.

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.

Richard Günther is playing with this, he started a project on the build service for it, Andreas -- Andreas Jaeger, aj@suse.de, http://www.suse.de/~aj/ SUSE Linux Products GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F FED1 389A 563C C272 A126