NetBSD/sparc64 Projects

This is a list of ongoing projects, or projects that are waiting for volunteers to pick them up.

Kernel

  • Threaded programs crash: there is an anoying bug, probably somewhere related to trap handling or register saving/restoring, that causes register on return from syscall() to be restored from the wrong storage - resulting in all local registers being zero. This can be observed for example by running firefox: it crashes inside libpthread, when dereferencing a pointer stored in (say) %l6, supposed to point to the current thread, but after the syscall being NULL.
  • SMP: multiple CPUs attach, but secondary CPUs imediately crashes the kernel when leaving the idle loop. This needs to be debugged and fixed.
  • USIII: Support for UltraSparc III (and higher) CPUs and their PCI bridges needs to be written.
  • COMPAT_NETBSD32: This needs more work. A number of systems calls either need to be completely re-implemented inside this module, or they need to be modularized so they don't issue copyin()/copyout()s and all the parameters can be converted. Currently lwp-ified applications do not work at all.
  • Cleanup locore.s: Locore.s needs a cleanup.
  • KGDB: The code for kgdb needs to be fixed back up.
  • IOMMU: The iommu code may be a performance bottleneck. This needs to be investigated.

Drivers

Some drivers for hardware found in sparc64 machines are still missing:
  • floppy drive
  • smart card reader (found in Blade/Netra systems)
  • environmental sensors
  • power buttons (on anything but U5/U10 machines)

Userland

  • We should provide bootloaders for non-ufsv1 filesystems.
  • We could build both sparc and sparc64 libraries and allow userland (and third party/pkgsc) programs to be build as 32bit binaries.
  • Lots of pkgsrc software needs fixes for sparc64.
  • Some of the assembler routines used in our libraries use registers that they should not change, according to the ABI. This is a problem for example with CLISP. Carefull review is needed.

(contact us)   Generated from %NetBSD: projects.xml,v 1.8 2006/02/13 14:40:43 martin Exp %
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