How many people are reading my blog? I see ~ 30 page impressions daily, but I don't know how many of them are unique. Also it's possible that people read only the how-to, and not the rest. How many of you are actually reading this? Just leave a comment. If you do it anonymously, then please sign your message somehow, so I can distinguish you (if there is more than one of you :). It would be also interesting to know why are you reading this.
I see that this week there were suddenly two banner clicks! Who has clicked? I'd like to thank this people. Was there an interesting banner?
The question to the people who didn't click: are you annoyed by the ads here? I think about switching the banners off: after all 2 clicks within half a year is not a top business solution. Actually I'm also considering switching off this blog. Doesn't seem to be the right way for getting rich and famous.
Things I did for qemu/sparc weren't a rocket science. When I started a half year ago I didn't know neither the sparc assembly language, nor SPARCstation architecture, nor forth, nor qemu, nor git. Which means that I fixed all of this bugs just because I cared to fix them. Any other person who'd care would have fixed them too. Nobody else did, so probably no one actually needs emulating Solaris/sparc? Does any of you miss emulation of some other architecture/OS?
Sunday, February 21, 2010
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20 comments:
Hi. Looks like I'm first :)
Reading just because I've had some Solaris experience in the past (but on real hardware).
Читаю. Но скорее из-за любопытства. Нет сопоставимого с современным РС железа, по вменяемым ценам для человека с окладом до 400$. И по этому смотрю на это дело как на полигон где буду учиться гонять разные версии SunOS/Solaris. В сторону которых, даже про современные версии, было высказано много негатива.
Леонид
Hi There!
Jason here. I am reading this almost daily to see where you are up to with your Sparc fixes. I am really interested to know asap when you get to the stage of being able to boot SunOS without percievable issues....That could be a while, but it could just be arround the corner!
I am suprised it is only a year since you started working on sparc emulation, maybe you have had experience in qemu before. To me it is a horrible mess (i would not know where to start), but i am glad of your hard work.
Hi Artyom!
Reading carefully because I'm enjoying technical creativity very much.
Not annoyed by banners since I'm reading thru RSS.
SPARC emulation is excellent idea, wish you best results. Emulation itself is wonderful, it helps exploring new edges of computing and preserving the past.
Thanks for your blog and works!
--
mtve
I have plenty of real SPARC hardware, so I have no immediate need to run emulated hardware. Just checking the development to see how much of an option it will be in the future.
(I am reading you blog via RSS, if that matters.)
Jason,
I agree that qemu is not straightforward. At some places there are trails of function references.
But SPARC, or at least sun4m is really easy to understand and meanwhile good documented. Forth was fun too, don't know why people are so scared of it.
Anonymous (the last one),
it may be an option in the future, but only if we care about it in the present :).
The more you wait the less chances to get it working you have. People just find other ways to solve the problems.
Solaris 2.3-2.5.1 is currently fully functional under qemu/git, but I don't see around any people crying out "Hurrah". Booting Solaris 9 would have the same effect in few years...If not already.
Hi Artyom,
I use some rather old SunOS/Solaris applications and have dying Sparc hardware.
Some SunOS applications can run using NetBSD/Linux SunOS emulation but unfortunately not all.
I really appreciate all efforts you've made, and the efforts made by e.g. Blue Swirl and Igor Kovalenko as well.
I read the blog regularly (was on break recently and have been bogged down with other projects), and am excited that it looks like you have Sparc-32 Solaris fully functional at this point (with just a minor tweak to /etc/system)!
Sure, Sparc-64 would be neat and allow for later Solaris versions, but I imagine it will have quite a few challenges, and 32-bit Solaris 9 should realistically be just fine for us to emulate a node for some really old legacy apps that don't work on Intel Linux and retire our old Ultrasparc hardware.
Congrats and many thanks! I hope to try an install out soon (I'll shoot for Solaris 9).
interested in getting sparc/sparc64 running within qemu too.
Hi Артем,
I am reading this since we have resurrected a SPARCstation 10 and a SPARCstation 20 (two CPUs) and we can help with some stuff on a real hardware. I think your blog is something I always want to have, i.e. to write freely about my own hacking in progress.
As for ads, I use Privoxy (http://www.privoxy.org/) so I don't see them.
Keep up good work and do not give up!
It's sometimes important to have emulation of the old the hardware.
I remember running 2.5/x86 in the past on the Tricord SMP Server, back in 1997, no other modern OS at the time could do run there so well.
--Marcin
Hi Marcin,
it's cool that you've resurrected a real hardware. I guess there are just a few people in the World who keep using SPARCstations.
What OS do you have on them?
And what OBP versions?
Артём
Well I wanted to comment on this earlier, but I wasn't sure if I'd say this right...
I know it’s kind of disappointing to get 0 clickthrus on the whole google adsense thing. Let me share my numbers so you get an idea of what a small market we are…
I have 190 blog posts going back to 5/13/2007.
Of those, adsense says I’ve had 30,187 page impressions and 26 clicks!
That’s right 26!!!!!!!!
So far they say I’ve earned a whopping $8.85…
So yeah, it’s not exactly a big money maker.
But I do know one of the things that people at least read is the whole thing I did on converting Xenix machines into Qemu VM’s. Now if I were to take the time to make a product, this would be it.
As from all the great work you’ve contributed to the SPARC & Qemu that is an angle I would suggest. Try migrating some legacy Sparc system into Qemu! Once people find out via google that it’s possible to ‘rescue’ some legacy application into Qemu and run it on anything people will bite.
Even getting to single user mode in Solaris is a ‘big deal’… You’ve been a great help to the cause as it were…. I certainly appreciate it!
27 ;-). It's a lot compared to my 4. Thanks for the warm words. Actually I stared my work on qemu because I had a legacy project myself. But, it's on hold since like 5 months, so no success stories yet. Well except that qemu is a success story itself. It's more like a hobby now.
I have also hacks for multi-user. Slowly converting them into patches. Stay tuned.
I've been reading this because I'm trying to get qemu working with NetBSD/sparc, and was getting no joy with any of the pre-built packages. Thanks to you, I have it booting, although there are still some issues, including an interrupt problem similar to the ones you've been discussing with people--if there's a lot of disk activity, NetBSD/sparc crashes after ten spurious interrupts. This happens quite repeatably during installs, although I've been able to get past it by doing a minimal install.
I'd actually rather be running Solaris, but I need to track down some ancient install media first.
Ted, which version of NetBSD you are fighting with? The new ones seem to work out of the box, for a couple of the ancient versions I found some tricks.
I'm using the very latest version - 5.0.3, I think. It works fine, except for the crash when installing if I do a non-minimal install. However, that was running the emulator on Linux under VMware Fusion. I have QEMU running native on OS X now, and haven't re-done the test, so I don't know if it still breaks.
I happened upon your site while trying to find out what the state of the qemu sparc emulation was like. You've got a lot of useful information on here, and I always enjoy reading about interesting developer hacks.
Come to think of it, I should see if I can find the SparcStation LX or 5 that I might have hanging around my basement...
Calvin,
don't wait too long for getting the hardware out of the basement. Soon your SS-5 (or LX) is going to be only good for booting NeXTStep (ok, maybe a couple of early versions of NetBSD too). :)
There's something strange with Google Ads in you blog: the places for them are reserved, but they don't show up, so your blogposts are mixed with blank spaces.
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