gentoo lowered sparc support :-(

"hppa and sparc destabilized: Since we do not have hardware readily available anymore and these architectures mostly fill a retrocomputing niche, stable keywords have been dropped for both hppa (PA-RISC) and sparc. The architectures will remain supported with testing keywords." https://www.gentoo.org/news/2026/01/05/new-year.html
#gentoo #sparc #sparc64

2025 in retrospect & happy new year 2026! – Gentoo Linux

News and information from Gentoo Linux

Just another honest weekend's work keeping an up-to-date browser working... On the other hand, the most trackable user agent in the world. #netbsd #sparc64 #palemoon

@k0nze @thomholwerda I can only speak for SPARC since that is what I use, but yeah, native build servers do exist and are maintained by volunteers.
There's a couple maintained by the Compile Farm project[1] (in which you can request SSH access to experiment with porting, etc.) and LLVM also has a buildbot machine for its CI[2].

As far as Rust is concerned, SPARC (at least the 64-bit variant) platforms are listed as official targets in rustc documentation[3]. Of course, yes, it's only at tier 2/3 (unfortunately!) but it's still very functional - at the very least Gentoo and OpenBSD[4] ships with some selection of Rust packages in their repos, and rustc does work okay over there.
Though, performance-wise it (and other compilers implemented on top of LLVM - including clang itself) still generates slllliiiiiightly slower code than GCC because atm LLVM's SPARC backend isn't as aggressively optimizing as its GCC counterpart, but this is being actively worked on too.

For more general issue tracker, there's also the sparclinux project who provides it[5].

In short, using Rust or other modern tools are very possible on a SPARC box, but clearly there's still a lot more to do so any help here would be very welcome  
Guess tagging this with #rust #sparc #sparc64 too for visibility haha

1: https://portal.cfarm.net/machines/list/
2: https://lab.llvm.org/staging/#/builders/82
3: https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/rustc/platform-support.html
4: It's unfortunate too that Solaris support require Solaris 11.4 upwards, which I think rules out the vast majority of hobbyist machines (since 11.4 requires SPARC T4 or SPARC64 X processor from ~2011 as a baseline), but this is something that the Solaris porters at LLVM have decided, from what I understand.
5: https://github.com/sparclinux/issues/issues

The cfarm compile farm project

@FandaSin @ActionRetro It's an #AMD64 #Opteron-based #Workstation.

  • Late-era #Sun offered low-and medium-end systems with #AMD64 and reserved #SPARC64 for their highest-end systems...

I do know a [former] customer/user of these systems and I may be able to grab some used systems from them...

  • Granted #SunMicrosystems rarely updated the chassis of their systems because "why?" and also because that adds only costs and rately benefits them or their clients to do so.
Found an old picture of my home network from the old house. Obvs I was something of a Sun Microsystems / 'nix fan. The noise, heat, and electric bill were obscene, however there wasn't much I couldn't do on the network. Good times..
#solaris64sparc
#sparc64
#Linux
#homenetwork
Hey everyone, question for you all Sun lovers out there: What is a good (and reliable) alternative to an IDE disk for a Sun UltraSparc 5/10? I just bought an IDE-to-SATA converter, and while the drives are correctly detected, I get DMA timeouts trying to write anything to disk. #retrocomputing #sparc64 #solaris

Found a way to reset the security-mode on a SUN netra t1 105
See

https://pestilenz.org/~bauerm/shoestring/2025/06/29/#netra.t1

#sparc64 #oldhardware #freebsd

The Shœstring Foundation Weblog

I have #sparc64 induced back pain. Always bring a trolley to the post office, just in case.
Picked up some quality literature about a RISC I'm willing to take #sparc64 #sparc