NetBSD/sparc64 Projects

This is a list of ongoing projects, or projects that are waiting for volunteers to pick them up.

Kernel

Threaded programs crash: there is an anoying bug, probably somewhere related to trap handling or register saving/restoring, that causes register on return from syscall() to be restored from the wrong storage - resulting in all local registers being zero. This can be observed for example by running firefox: it crashes inside libpthread, when dereferencing a pointer stored in (say) %l6, supposed to point to the current thread, but after the syscall being NULL.
SMP: multiple CPUs attach, but secondary CPUs imediately crashes the kernel when leaving the idle loop. This needs to be debugged and fixed.
USIII: Support for UltraSparc III (and higher) CPUs and their PCI bridges needs to be written.
COMPAT_NETBSD32: This needs more work. A number of systems calls either need to be completely re-implemented inside this module, or they need to be modularized so they don't issue copyin()/copyout()s and all the parameters can be converted. Currently lwp-ified applications do not work at all.
Cleanup locore.s: Locore.s needs a cleanup.
KGDB: The code for kgdb needs to be fixed back up.
IOMMU: The iommu code may be a performance bottleneck. This needs to be investigated.

Some drivers for hardware found in sparc64 machines are still missing:

We should provide bootloaders for non-ufsv1 filesystems.
We could build both sparc and sparc64 libraries and allow userland (and third party/pkgsc) programs to be build as 32bit binaries.
Lots of pkgsrc software needs fixes for sparc64.
Some of the assembler routines used in our libraries use registers that they should not change, according to the ABI. This is a problem for example with CLISP. Carefull review is needed.