Ra (Freya) (it/its)𒀭𒈹𒍠𒊩Is there anyone in #Australia or #NZ, or who would be willing to ship to NZ, who could donate a #SPARC #Solaris (sun4u/sun4v) machine to the building effort for FractalKit? We're running up against some limits and some really bad time sinks, doing all of this on a 650MHz #UltraSPARC IIe is.... really really painful. We know this is a long shot, but if anyone out there has a machine they could donate to this we would be immensely thankful. This porting effort is really important to us but it's not going to be actually useful if a single library takes a day to compile.
number 1 javascript enthusiast@freya i dont really know anything about this but how hard would it be to cross compile, or maybe emulate the userspace for building stuff
@mothcompute quite. Cross-compilation we don't know anything about, and Solaris 10 is quite old so targeting that from any kind of modern OS..... we can't ensure that it wouldn't leak in some unpleasant ways. Emulation.... not really possible. SPARC32, yes, Solaris 9 on qemu works... kinda, but Solaris 10, SPARC64, no. Plus that would likely be *slower* than this 650MHz UltraSPARC
@freya more spitballing than a serious suggestion but with a list of syscalls and all the headers and stuff it might be possible to emulate the sparc code and translate any traps to native linux calls
@mothcompute maybe? doubt it though, the Solaris syscalls are........different.
@freya oh thats very interesting. elaborate
@mothcompute there are certain features, contracts, profiles, projects, that Solaris has that Linux.... doesn't. contracts are kinda like cgroups but... different. same with projects. profiles are an RBAC thing that Linux just kinda never has had and probably never will, it's too fragmented for that. Plus honestly? We don't trust crosscompilation like that. We don't trust that it won't leak some Linuxism into it, or that we'll build with a too new GCC and it'll inject UltraSPARC-III extentions, or that it'll build for SunOS 5.11 not 5.10...
@mothcompute profiles are fucking cool, every privilege on the system has a profile, or a set of privileges can be a profile, so you can say "this person can manage these services in these ways but not these, they can update packages but not install new ones except these specific options, they can reboot the machine but not throw it into a differnt runlevel..."
@freya the main question is whether gcc or make or such will use those calls. if not it might be pretty simple to translate enough to get a toolchain to run
@mothcompute mrmmmm. maybe.... it seems... fragile. incredibly fragile
@freya it might be worth dtracing to see what all calls a build uses but i wouldnt know how to do that
@mothcompute we just need to figure out how to get our hands on like a T5. Hopefully, not a T5 that got dropkicked by NZ post