A lot has happened recently for the sparc64 port. Sysinstall and make release work and can be used to build installable snapshots. The gdb5.3 port now works, and, thanks to Thomas Moestl, kernel crash dumps are supported which can be analyzed by gdb. These 2 items are the last things considered necessary by the Core team for FreeBSD/sparc64 to be a Tier 1 architecture, which means that 5.0-RELEASE for sparc64 will be officially supported by the release engineering team and by the security officer team.

Recently Jake Burkholder has been working on alternate installation methods other than bootable iso, including a mini-root filesystem which can be written to the swap partition of an existing machine. Thomas Moestl has been putting some finishing touches on the release process, ensuring that the release documentation can be built properly, and that the port readme files can be generated by the release process.

An experimental iso built with make release is now available on the freebsd ftp site and mirrors in /pub/FreeBSD/development/sparc64/5.0-20021031-SNAP. It is expected that by the middle of November new 5.0-SNAP releases will be available every few days for download and for ftp install, cpu power and bandwidth permitting.