sun4v arch

[Kris Kennaway]

Peter Jeremy wrote:
> On 2008-Aug-22 17:04:00 +0200, Kris Kennaway <kris at freebsd.org> wrote:
>> Just so everyone is on the same page, what is needed to keep sun4v 
>> viable are people with experience with (or intention to learn about) low 
>> level architectural and implementation details of the FreeBSD kernel
> 
> What documentation is currently accurate for this beyond the source
> code?  The only things I can quickly find are: "Design & Implementation
> of FreeBSD 5.2" and "FreeBSD Architecture Handbook".  The former is
> getting quite old and I'm not sure how up-to-date the latter is kept.

I'm not aware of any detailed documentation about how to port FreeBSD to 
new architectures, which is basically the skillset needed.  On the other 
hand I'm not the best person to ask since I don't have this skillset myself.

>> the sun4v hardware platform,
> 
> Is the documentation at http://www.opensparc.net/opensparc-t1/index.html
> and http://www.opensparc.net/opensparc-t2/index.html adequate for this
> or is there additional information that is needed?  Is there any tutorial
> style documentation on the low-level T1/T2 details?
> 
>> who know their way around things like 
>> pmap.c and other MD places where the kernel interfaces with the "bare 
>> metal",
> 
> I've poked around the low-level details of FreeBSD/i386 and /Alpha in
> the past, though I'm nothing like an expert at it.  sun4v/sun4v is
> only about twice the size of a 6th Edition kernel...
> 
>> and who are willing to make a long term (multi-year) commitment
>> to supporting the platform.
> 
> Yes.
> 
> Is there a summary of the open issues somewhere?  There are no sun4v
> PRs open.  

Basically it doesn't even get that far.  As I mentioned elsewhere, 
buildworld -j will usually fail.

Kris

> http://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/sun4v effectively hasn't
> been touched since November 2006 and suggests that the only critical
> issue is lack of serial port support.