Thanks to Steve Quirk, Chandra V., and the folks at donations@ I now have an UltraSparc 10 for working on hwpmc support.

In addition to hwpmc work, I intend to use the machine to ensure that the my ports run on the Sparc64. Further, this architecture is a very good one for catching inadvertent assumptions about byte ordering and address alignment in one’s code. So I’m very pleased that I have a Sparc box to work on.

First though, it appears that Bangalore might just be too hot for the machine. The machine is showing symptoms of overheating (cache errors, watchdog timeouts and the like). Perhaps improving the airflow inside the machine will help. On the positive side, it does boot reliably to the OpenFirmware prompt so further exploration of the problem is at least possible. There isn’t much of a Sparc ecosystem in Bangalore left (unlike a decade ago), so repairs will need to be in D-I-Y mode.

Wiki page http://wiki.freebsd.org/LibElf/ImplementationStatus now contains a short summary of the state of the LibElf project.