Rants & Ramblings

Yeah, we support it now.
Turned out genfb would have worked out fo the box if the firmware wasn't buggy - the OpenFirmware calls to change palette registers don't work and in 32bit colour the 'linebytes' property incorrectly contains the same value as 'width'. So I added a workaround, if 'linebytes' is smaller than bytes_per_pixel*width then we know 'linebytes' is bogus and use that instead. Yeah, it's slow but it works.
The PGX32 isn't much more than an off-the-shelf Permedia2 with Sun firmware and a few jumpers to turn off things like fixed VGA PCI resources. XFree86's glint driver supports the chip and would have worked out of the box if it had ever been tested on a big endian machine with an operating system that enforces PCI mapping restrictions - NetBSD doesn't allow you to mmap PCI space that doesn't belong to any device. The driver on the other hand was written a little bit sloppy - there's a register block, 128kB, which contains the same set of registers twice, once big endian and once little endian. The little endian block comes first. Now the problem is that the driver always tries to mmap 128kB even when it wants the 2nd part which results in attempting to map 64kB of unoccupied PCI space. Trivial to fix but still annoying.
Other than that it Just Works(tm).

Yesterday I went insane or something and tried to run Opera 7.54 under NetBSD's COMPAT_SVR4 on my 3GX ( I used 7.54 because I had it around and was just too lazy to download something newer at that point ). As expected it barfed over a bad system call. Since this particular error didn't happen on sparc64 I had a look - turns out the 32bit emulation maps this particular call to an empty function returning 0 so I changed COMPAT_SVR4 accordingly and the error went away. And Opera just started. No garbled GUI like on sparc64, everything looked fine.
Poking around a bit more I found that DNS lookups don't work in opera. Poking around even more I found that DNS lookups don't work with any Solaris binary ( like, telnet <some_IP> works, but telnet some.host.name doesn't if it required a DNS lookup ).
I'm using libraries snatched from a machine running Solaris 9 and apparently Sun added a shedload of new sockio()s and the DNS resolver barfs if sockio(SIOCGLIFNUM) fails. Christos added it over night and now Opera works fine with 'Synchronous DNS' enabled.
The reason why I find this noteworthy is - by todays standards this machine is slow ( just a 110MHz MicroSPARC II ) and has not much RAM ( 64MB ). Opera is fast enough to be useful. It's certainly faster than the HTML renderer in KDE1 and running something gecko-based with only 64MB RAM is a joke. In fact only Dillo is faster but it doesn't support any CSS and of course lacks just about everything Opera supports.
Just for kicks ( and to get rid of the ad banner which is really annoying on a small 800x600 screen ) I installed Opera 8.52 - works just fine. Not a bit slower than 7.54, quite the opposite actually.
So big thumbs up to Opera Software for making the only modern browser that's usable on this kind of hardware.