Sparc

From TALinuxWiki

The Linux sparc (sun4) port in fairly old, it started already in 1994 and supports many of Suns workstations, server and some clones. Both old 32-bit systems and current 64-bit UltraSPARCs are supported. At this time support for older systems lags a little behind as there is no official maintainer for them.

Userland is 32-bit, and 64-bit (experimental) also possible on UltraSPARC. Userland does not default to being 64-bit as it is not faster, but instead a little bit slower.

1 Sub-types
- 1.1 Sun4
- 1.2 Sun4c
- 1.3 Sun4m
- 1.4 Sun4d
- 1.5 Sun4u

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Sub-types

The Sparc line is divieded into many sub-types, most of these are 32-bit and one 64-bit.

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Sun4

The oldest type. 32-bit. Support for these are very minial if at all.

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Sun4c

The oldest of the supported types. Machines included in this category are:

SPARCstation 1
SPARCstation 1+
SPARCstation 2
IPC
IPX
ELC

All processors in the sun4c line are missing the udiv and umul instructions and that makes this machines slow. And Linux has other speed problems on them and does not run as fast as NetBSD.

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Sun4m

A very well supported sub-type. 32-bit. Most of the machines are uniprocessor, but the SS10 and SS20 supports SMP up 4 processors with MBus cards. Much faster than the sun4c.