# Is FreeBSD for sparc coming to and end?



## munocat (Jun 14, 2020)

I have spent 2 weeks now trying to get FreeBSD to run on one of my SunBlade 100s. There are no repositorie, fair enough, but I run into many ports build problems, and I wonder if it is worth trying to peruse FreeBSD on Sparc64, or cut my loses and move on to NetBSD.  I was told on r/FreeBSD, that basically Sparc64 will no longer be supported in release 13


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## sko (Jun 15, 2020)

From what I remember when trying to run FreeBSD (IIRC 11.2-RELEASE and 11.3-RELEASE) on my T-1000 the sparc64/ultraSPARC project is pretty much the work of very few individuals with very limited (and obviously declining) resources. It mostly works/worked, which is nice, but if you expect to "just use it" like on any Tier-1 platform, you shouldn't use it. There are a lot less packages and ports available (IIRC anything which needs e.g. some of those fancy, new languages like rust, node etc) and building something with lots of dependencies from ports can often take days on smaller/older machines. Hardware support was also very much hit or miss...
Due to the declining interest it seems support will be dropped in the 13 branch...

On my T1000 I chose to run OpenBSD, where the sparc64 port except for the "new & easy style OS-upgrade" via syspatch everything is working as expected and installation with various openboot/ILOM/ALOM variants/versions is documented. OpenBSD even has LDOM support and can configure domains via ldomctl and SMP is working (IIRC it was still a WIP for FreeBSD?).
On the package side most packages are available, again with the exception of packages that rely on any fancy new language with a compiler that can't be/hasn't been ported to sparc architecture due to various reasons (usually legal crap or just major disinterest and irrelevance...).
I'm running the T1000 as a firewall/router for testing purposes and have a LDOM set up with some basic networking services to act as fallback for my main router (it is still damn fast as a router, but for my 200mbit uplink the ubnt edgerouter 4 /w OpenBSD is easily capable enough and WAY more energy-efficient...). Haven't yet had a package missing that I couldn't replace with something else. The armv7 tree is missing _a lot_ more packages than the sparc64 port...


NetBSD is known for being ported to anything smarter than your average toaster, so if you want/need even better hardware support and/or larger package repository, you might be better off with NetBSD (I haven't checked/compared available packages for NetBSD vs OpenBSD!). I'm more familiar with OpenBSD than NetBSD, so I'm using it on systems/architectures where FreeBSD doesn't work or fit my needs, but YMMV


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## kpedersen (Jun 15, 2020)

+1 for OpenBSD (running it on my V210). I originally chose it because there seemed to be more documentation.

OpenBSD supports a smaller set of hardware than NetBSD but what it does support, it does very well. Most packages (especially those relating to server use) seem to work fine for me.


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## Mjölnir (Jun 15, 2020)

munocat said:


> I have spent 2 weeks now trying to get FreeBSD to run on one of my SunBlade 100s. [...] or cut my loses and move on to NetBSD. [...]


I was very happy with OpenSolaris (now IllumOS) on Sun servers, a Sun Fire 280R was closest to your Blade 100.  Nearest to the genuine OS.  With any BSD's on these machines (a E4500 and two 280'er) I always had trouble (ok, esp. on the old E4500: no S-BUS support).

! These old machines suck power like some people eat chips... Are you shure you want to run it?
It can become an expensive hobby.


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## Mjölnir (Jun 15, 2020)

sko said:


> [...] I'm running the T1000 as a firewall/router [...] to act as fallback for my main router (it is still damn fast as a router, but for my 200mbit uplink the ubnt edgerouter 4 /w OpenBSD is easily capable enough and WAY more energy-efficient...). [...]


The SPARC T1 in the T1000 was the most energy-efficient CPU when it was released...


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## sko (Jun 26, 2020)

mjollnir said:


> The SPARC T1 in the T1000 was the most energy-efficient CPU when it was released...



Yes, and it still is quite a remarkable piece of tech especially considering its age. But still, for the little throughput I have/need for my small uplink, the edgerouter is more than capable enough at ~10W power consumption and with passive cooling.
I still like to use the T1000 though and I'm frequently using it to test things. It's still a quite beefy machine and used for the "correct load" easily capable of saturating multiple GBit links - which a lot of current x86 platforms with much better "on-paper-performance" are still struggling with... 

Oh, and of course it's always fun singing "we have joy, we have fun, we run unix on a sun" in the back of your head


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