At the conference, I bumped into Quintela and he said: "Oh by the way, I still have two JavaStation Krups, they run [something very ancient]". Later we had a sparc(32) mini-BOF with Rusty, WLI, Uzi and Anton (as a guest of honor :). Rusty delivered a short, but energetic speach, in which he threatened to throw the port out of the kernel tree if it does not get updated (I advocated such action at one time myself).
Of course, I am not afraid of Rusty, or not sufficiently afraid, anyhow. OTOH, to win the dubious honours of the only architecture requiring syscalls for futexes... and coding special traps for them... hmmm... I do not understand how it happened, but I fixed up 2.5.24 to compile on sparc and DaveM was going to take the patch into the vger tree.
This is all fine and dandy, but we still do not have anyone to take over the DaveM's mantle. WLI has some serious Linux work at IBM, and so does Anton. At best they can perform so called "seagull maintainership" (I stole this term from Willy). Uzi may do it, but something interfered when he tried. Elsewhere we have Tom Sczerpe (sp?), and Spot. I am not exactly sure about them. Spot definitely has an access to a sparc64, and it may be too much of a siren call. Oh well... I'll just keep a tree alive in case anyone decides to take over.