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Comment by gravypod | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know where you can

    1) find SPARC systems
    2) find what you need to do to initialize all components on a SPARC system

I'd love to write an OS for a SPARC machine one day

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> where you can find SPARC systems

In case by "find" you mean "where are SPARCs still being used"... It is something of a niche, but all our missions in the European Space Agency use LEON processors; a design based on SPARC [1].

And since you mentioned OSes, usually it is either bare-metal stuff or RTEMS [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEON [2] https://www.rtems.org/

Ebay "SPARCstation"? Shipping tends to be expensive as they are heavy, and you need to make sure you get a complete system. You can probably find a version of Netbsd or OpenBSD that boots and has source, from which you can reverse-engineer the startup.

Some of Netgear's ReadyNAS devices had (slow by today's standards) SPARC chips in them[1]; I have a ReadyNAS Duo with a SPARC chip in it. They also have a Debian-based OS for SPARC.

[1] Search for "SPARC" in http://www.downloads.netgear.com/files/GDC/RND2110/Duov1_NV+....

I wonder how hard it would be to run SunOS 4.1.4, the last great Sun operating system before it all went downhill? [1]

[1] http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/slowlaris/worst-...

I picked up an old UltraSPARC Sun server a while back for $10. Never got it running as I didn't understand serial connections and it was annoyingly loud.

You can put one on an FPGA. The OpenSPARC cores are GPL.

eBay, and probably by reading the NetBSD/SPARC source.

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