[9fans] Sparc Port

[9fans] Sparc Port

[Tim Newsham]

I just got rc, ls, echo and a few other programs running on my ultra2
box, and I figured this would be a nice time to make an announcement.

I'm working on getting plan9 working on sparc.  I currently have it
running off of a ram based boot filesystem in an emulator based on
the SparcClassic (sun4m), and I just got it running in a ram based
boot filesystem on my ultra2 (sun4u).  These are both fairly preliminary
and the 4u in particular is very unstable.  Both ports borrow from
the earlier (2nd edition?) ports to the ss2, ss10 and lx.  The ultra2
is a sparc v9 chip, but it is currently running 32-bit userland binaries
compiled with kc/kl/ka (only slightly modified to adjust the page size).

If anyone is interested in helping out, there's still a bit left
to be done.  I'm going to continue working on the ultra2 port, and
a friend is working on bringing up the 4m code on a sparcstation 10.
Still to be done, roughly in this order:

   - debugging/stability
   - ethernet drivers
   - 64-bit compiler for the v9.
     - get a sparc64 userland tree built.
     - convert the ultra2 kernel to full 64-bit.
   - userland cleanup -- make sure everything builds (only using a subset
     of the userland tree right now).
   - kernel cleanup
   - graphics drivers
   - scsi drivers
   - performance
   - other sparc based platforms (depending on interest, availability of
     hardware and contributors)
     - merging port trees for similar platforms, sharing device drivers
       where appicable.

If anyone is interested in contributing, please let me know.

Tim N.