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Will my SPARC binaries run unchanged on UltraSPARC machines?

April 26, 2017binaries machines run sparc ultrasparc unchanged

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Will my SPARC binaries run unchanged on UltraSPARC machines?

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Yes. One of the most important goals of the UltraSPARC project was full binary compatibility with existing SPARC hardware and software. If it isn’t compatible, it’s a bug! There are some things you should keep in mind though: if you broke the rules but got away with it in the previous generations of SPARC machines, your luck may just have run out. When developing the UltraSPARC it was discovered that some code generators didn’t leave all “reserved” bits in opcodes zero. Such instructions are either illegal instructions which are trapped and fixed in the UltraSPARC kernel or they are legal V9 instructions which will modify the program behaviour. All such programs can be run through “cleanV8”, a program designed to correct the bogus instructions. No instructions of the second category have been found, so even without “cleanV8” you should be safe. Another thing is the memory map on UltraSPARC, some applications use an mmap(MAP_FIXED) call with an address that is illegal to use on UltraSPA