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OS Review: NetBSD 1.6.2 on SPARC64

Posted by michael on from the esoterica dept.

JigSaw writes "NetBSD is the king of operating system portability, running on 40+ different hardware platforms, including x86, MIPS, and even the Sega Dreamcast. So it comes as no surprise that among the supported platforms, NetBSD runs on Tony Bourke's Sun Ultra 5. Here is his review."

2 of 58 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What's the big deal? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    a 64-bit kernel with 32-bit userland.
    NetBSD wants to have 64-bit userland.

  2. Re:Ultra 5? Oh please no by 680x0 · · Score: 4, Informative
    A far better measure of how well an OS has been ported is an Ultra 2.
    I have an Ultra 1 (UltraSparc @ 167MHz), and I have to say that my experience installing NetBSD 1.6.1 was quite similar to his experience (panic during install, no binary packages available, etc.) And, besides, the review seemed to focus on the app side of things, not the driver/hardware side.

    That said, I don't think there's anything major that can't be fixed. Once installed, it's run flawlessly, and the only package I couldn't compile from pkgsrc is Apache 2.x (I installed Apache 1.x instead).

    I've had the (32-bit) sparc port of NetBSD running solidly on a SparcStation-2 for over a year and a half (it's my DHCP/NTP/DNS server).