Is port cursed?

No. SuperH(SH4) is one of center products of Renesas Electronics. Linux already works, and there is many user waiting for port to Debian.

Are machines available to general public?

Yes, there are some devices with sh4.

Is full source available?

Yes, the SH4 port uses standard versions of the Linux kernel, binutils, libc, gcc, and other packages. All of them have support for Renesas Electronics, mostly maintained by CodeSourcery.

This cpu support bi-endian. Many users use little endian. SH4 port uses little endian. We may support bigendian in the future. This will become sh4eb in that case.

Are there 3 or more developers (or n-ms) actively maintaining the port? Who are they?

What sort of architecture is this?

SH4 is mostly an architecture targeted at the embedded market.

Does it have any users? If an embedded system are there real systems shipping that a Debian port will be useful for?

The distribution used in Renesas Solutions MS7724 board.MS7724

Is there kernel and toolchain support? At what level? Are the latest versions supported, or are legacy releases required for compatibility with some hardware?

Latest versions are fully supported. Toolchain was supported by CodeSourcery.

Has the ABI stabilised, or are there major ABI changes coming up?

Yes, ABI is stable.

How do you install a system?

network install

Has a buildd been setup? How much of the archive has been built (count by source package, builds of old versions are fine for this case)?

Yes. We have 10 buildd. And these are working on debian-ports. These build unstable and experimental now

What hardware is potentially available as a fast buildd?

We are using sh7785lcr board to buildd. This board has sh7785. This cpu is 600MHz. And this board has 512MB DDR2 memory, PCI slotx2 , S-ATAx2, USB 2.0 port x2, Gitabit ether x1 and DVI.

This board uses u-boot for bootloader, linux-2.6 works.

Is there any corporate support of this arch, and the Debian port in particular?

Renesas Electronics and ST Microelectronics.

Is there an example box developers can login to to see if it works?

Yes, we setuped 2 porterbox.

It's also worth considering whether the port has any special requirements.

While debian-installer doesn't make sense for all SH4 targets, we support it for a number of devices.