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On Friday 04 October 2002 19:23, Eric Botcazou wrote:
> > Due to my university trashing some old hardware, I am now the happy
owner
> > of a SPARC-4 workstation. It currently resides underneath my desk
awaiting
> > installation of an operating system (probably Linux or NetBSD) and
> > transport home.
>
> I'm not familiar at all with the Sparc workstations (although I used to
surf
> the Net with Mosaic on a Sparc in the early days): is it a Sparc32 or a
> Sparc64 machine ?
It's a Sparc32. I *think* Sparc64 normally runs in Sparc32 mode, basically
emulating a Sparc32, but I'm not sure.
The new workststions are Sparc64, though, so I have acces to those also
(but I'm supposed to be working when I'm there, of course).
> > Would it be worthwile to look into adding SPARC optimizations to the
> > Allegro build tree?
>
> Do you mean asm optimizations ? I'd say, if they can somehow be reused on
> "modern" Sparc machines, maybe. Otherwise, let this dinosaur die
peacefully :-)
I think they can be, but I'm not sure it's not similar to optimizting i386
code when your target machine is a pentium :-)
And of course I know absolutely nothing about the Sparc assembly language,
so I'm not sure if I can improve on gcc's output - but I'll see.
There could be options to the configure script at any rate. I may be able
to figure out something of the display hardware if it's of any use.
If I can get my hands on a soundcard (some of the other machines had
soundcards, but they were already taken >:-|) I may be able to write a
driver for that (right now, Allegro has no sound support on Sparc, even if
the machine has a sound card).
And of course I have a nice low-end system to do some benchmarks :-D