The original BSD4.4 port was done by Chris Torek as a contract to LBL. The code was released by Chris in mid-93, and Theo de Raadt worked it into shape for the NetBSD tree. Theo and Markus Wild worked on improving Chris' original SunOS compatibility code into a highly complete and reliable emulation. Chuck Cranor ported the sun4c code to the 8KB pagesized Sun4 architecture, and Theo merged this code in a way that would allow the same kernel and programs to run on either sun4c or sun4 machines (unlike Sun's seperate kernel environments). This last change also required a rewrite of the device configuration code. Just after the NetBSD/sparc 1.0 release, Peter Galbavy wrote an ESP scsi device driver as a replacement for Chris' sparc-specific scsi code, this new driver unfortunately had some problems.
At this point a conflict emerged between Theo and the other people he started the NetBSD project with, and Theo was forced by the core group to resign from NetBSD. After Theo left NetBSD, a few people in the NetBSD group did some other things for the port: Paul Kranenburg ported a floppy driver and started writing support for the 4/400. Chuck spent many long hours working on the ie, xy, xd device drivers.
Theo continued working independently, and made a number of additions: P4 support, flexible boot strategy, a few graphics drivers with help from John Stone, and masses of bug fixes. Many people will be most interested that the ESP scsi driver has been completely replaced by Theo, and that it supports disconnect/reconnect.
Work on porting OpenBSD/sparc to the sun4m platform is currently in progress. This work is being done in cooperation between the OpenBSD group and a research group at a US university. This research group wishes to remain anonymous at this time. This work should be available for integration within the next few months.
OpenBSD/sparc can be correctly described as NetBSD/sparc + improvements.
The people working the most on OpenBSD/sparc currently consists of Chuck Cranor, Theo de Raadt, and David Miller. Of course, others are very welcome!
Snapshots are made available from time to time.
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