On Sun, 2006-10-01 at 11:29 +0200, Andreas Jaeger wrote:
"Alexey Eremenko" <al4321@gmail.com> 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: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org