Hi Alan, first of all, thanks a lot for providing another CBE release within such a short interval after the last one! I have already updated Debian's SPARC servers without any issues.
Being able to run a recent version of Solaris puts peace to the mind as we don't have to worry about potential unfixed CVEs. Plus, there are users who have reported issues with the previous CBE release on their SPARC S7, so I hope that issue will now be fixed as well. So, huge thanks to you and your colleagues for making this possible! On Fri, 2026-03-06 at 17:27 -0800, Alan Coopersmith wrote: > On 3/6/26 13:46, Peter Tribble wrote: > > > > Given the huge amount of effort they've put in to fix Y2038 issues, I would > > go > > for coincidence. > > (And I imagine the support lifetime isn't set by engineering.) > > We do have some input to it, and have paid attention to the 2038 issue when > providing our input, but the current dates are indeed set by customer demand, > and there are limits to how far forward we can reliably forecast that on the > business side. I think that date was also pushed into the future already, wasn't it? I think the original plan foresaw the end of the service life in 2034, didn't it? > We are assuming that even if all our support contracts are finished by the end > of 2037 that some customers will want to keep running the software past that, > based on our experience with customers popping up to ask about SunOS 4 or > Solaris 2.6 many years after their support lifetimes ended, and have been > working for more than a decade now to make that possible, though we're not > 100% complete yet. That makes me smile though. I have heard similar stories from other software vendors, including my employer. It's surprising what kind of old systems people are still using in production. > For instance, this CBE release makes the snoop command and the underlying > bufmod > streams module it uses become Y2038 safe (but broken instead in 2106, as > explained > under "Enhancements for Developers" in > https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/whats-new-in-oracle-solaris-11-4-sru-90 .) > > I gave some further explanation/examples on Mastodon last year: > https://hachyderm.io/@alanc/114519310064497360 > https://hachyderm.io/@alanc/114519356149693816 Thanks for the links. Definitely interested in such reads. Btw, there are some open-source projects involving SPARC that Oracle previously worked on but that never got upstreamed. For example, there is an incomplete port of libunwind to SPARC [1] that I extracted from the Oracle Linux 6 sources. I would love to get these upstreamed and have been trying to reach out to Oracle engineers to make this happen. If you have the possibility to talk to some people, that would be great. Adrian -- .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz : :' : Debian Developer `. `' Physicist `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
