This quarter had quite a lot of work done, including but certainly not limited to, in areas relating to everything from multiple architectures such as x86, aarch64, riscv, and ppc64 for both base and ports, over kernel changes such as vectored aio, routing lookups and multipathing, an alternative random(4) implementation, zstd integration for kernel dumps, log compression, zfs and preparations for pkg(8), along with wifi changes, changes to the toolchain like the new elfctl utility, and all the way to big changes like the git migration and moving the documentation from DocBook to Hugo/AsciiDoctor, as well as many other things too numerous to mention in an introduction.
The best way to keep up with FreeBSD development from an outsider’s perspective. FreeBSD is on my radar for the UltraSPARC server-as-a-workstation project – a reader has donated a SunFire V245 that’s currently in shipping to me – so I’m trying to be a bit more in tune than I usually am with the world of FreeBSD.
FreeBSD used to be a top-notch option on UltraSPARC systems, but it currently isn’t well supported. It’s been a Tier-2 architecture for a couple of releases, and won’t be supported at all in the upcoming FreeBSD 13, due out in late March.
The SunFire V245, though, is known to work with the latest release of FreeBSD (12.2)
FreeBSD was never top-notch on UltraSPARC systems. There was never any sun4v support and the sun4u support always had issues. Same goes for NetBSD; there has been work on copying over bits from OpenBSD for sun4v but it has never reached a point of being usable. With FreeBSD it is now dead. OpenBSD is the only *BSD with top-notch support and supports pretty much every model of system out there including the latest and greatest.
I missed your previous post. But just FYI, there is not a practical way of running modern Linux on the 32bit sun Sparcstations currently (unless you wanna run a retro Linux like RH 6.2 etc…)
I have ran a Sun Blade 150 fairly recently… and that has good Linux support even if it is a bit slow.
I also have a T2000 and T4-1 which have PCIe but I haven’t gotten graphics working on them yet I plan to have a go at throwing a low profile GPU in there. Like a WX2100 – WX4200, or a low profile RX card.
Well, not using swap on my servers from a long time ago… instead of buying SSD better buying more memory 🙂