There was an interesting thread on the Debian SPARC list this week – from what some are suggesting, sarge (Debian 3.1) may be the last release with 32-bit SPAFC support. I guess it comes as no surprise – sarge can no longer install out the box on sun4c machines (although there are workarounds) and the 2.6 kernel no longer supports SMP on sun4m machines.

It’s rather sad, but at least NetBSD has good 32-bit SPARC support (and supports SMP on 32-bit machines). Interestingly, NetBSD is supporting more legacy SPARC hardware with each release (for example, 3.0 will include almost complete support for the SPARCbook, including power management and accelerated framebuffer console and X11).