OpenBSD 4.0 brought support for UltraSPARC-III processors.
Unfortunately that support was not complete and we had to disable the
L1 data cache on the cpus. Over the last few months we made
significant improvements to the code that made it possible to fully
enable the UltraSPARC-III on-chip caches, which makes machines with
these cpus at least twice as fast. On top of that, thanks to donated
hardware, we were able to add cas(4), a driver for Sun's PCI
GigaSwift/Cassini ethernet adapters, which is found onboard on many
UltraSPARC-III based machines. like the Sun Fire 280R, V480 and V880.
So now would be an excellent time to test OpenBSD snapshots on your
favourite Sun Hardware.
We're also very interested in people trying OpenBSD on machines that
are still listed as unsupported on OpenBSD/sparc64 web page:
http://www.openbsd.org/sparc64.html
Although these machines are listed as unsupported, there actually is a
chance that OpenBSD will run on them. Reading through the
UltraSPARC-IV processor manual, there is no reason why our kernel
would not run on that CPU. So OpenBSD might run just fine on the Sun
Fire V490 and V890. The same goes for the new PCI-express base
machines like Ultra 25/45 and Sun Fire V125/V215/V245/V445. And if
nobody ever tries running OpenBSD on these machines, we'll never know.
So if you have access to any of these machines, please try booting
OpenBSD on it and send us a dmesg.
Thanks,
Mark
