On May 26, 2012, at 5:15 PM, Alasdair Lumsden wrote:
> (I don't know why this is on Illumos Dev list since it's more suited for the > discuss list - posting to both. Please respond on the discuss list ONLY) > > I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but SVR4 and SPARC are both dead. It's as > simple as that. Get over it and stop bothering the rest of us. SPARC may or may not be dead. More below. There are people with an interest in SVR4, but I contend that there is a problem here. The vast majority of those folks are in a "don't fix it if it ain't broke" mode, and are unlikely to "modernize" by updating to OpenIndiana or any other illumos based OS. Very few people run SXCE in production, and the upgrade from S10 to illumos is *substantial* (in ways that far transcend simple packaging) that I highly doubt any of the *commercial* S10 (or earlier! I think S8 is still run in production in places) users are going to be looking for a quasi-supported upgrade path from S10 to illumos (any distro!) In fact, I'd wager that the vast majority of commercially interesting users of Solaris usually just *reinstall* when going from one version to the next. The "upgrade" even before the major changes in OpenSolaris/SXCE/S11 was always so painful, so unlikely to work properly, and so generally *untrusted*, that almost nobody in *production* environments ever just did a an OS "upgrade". It was easier to just fresh install and move the applications & data over. Note that the key issue here is *applications*. There is another solution to that problem. Its called virtualization. And in S11 they have S8 and S10 zone support. In illumos we have kvm, which means we can host *any* older Solaris (x86 only), I think. That will provide a migration path, retaining the crufty concerning issues (compatibility of applications, APIs, and most importantly ABIs) while still letting folks move onto newer hardware. S'noracle realized this and its part of why they abandoned so much of their legacy -- because they could just port that legacy into an S10 or an S8 branded zone. :-) A different and more interesting (much more so from the question of "installed base of commercial users") is SPARC. kvm doesn't help them. In any event, SVR4 is about as commercially interesting as my toe jam. There may be market for it, but it's pretty darn tiny, and only in places that stink horribly. Its not a business I'd invest my time and energy in. Virtualization solutions that allow those customers to continue to run their apps (and their legacy OS' if need be!) are likely to bring far more value to the community. > > SPARC is a technology owned by Oracle. The only SPARC boxes you can buy on > eBay are relics, and I'd wager my Samsung Galaxy S2 phone with it's dual core > 1GHz ARM chip can outperform all of them. Power is now incredibly expensive, > and the economics of running old equipment make no sense what so ever. If you > buy an old SPARC box on ebay for $500, it's going to cost you more than that > per year to run it. I highly doubt your 1GHz dual core ARM can match a 64-way 450 MHz E10K, although its probably a lot closer than I'd like to admit :-) And that's a system that is very very old indeed. There are some powerful (especially in their day) SPARC systems still out there. The problem with SPARC is that they haven't kept up with current Intel hardware, and that some of the platform specific pieces of support code were never opened. None of them are particularly hard to reproduce, but who wants to spend a bunch of time working on code for systems that nobody can afford to power on any more? Show me someone who *really* is committed to spending lots of money to keep those systems running - not just running, but updatable to a newer OS -- (both in terms of power/equipment, and int terms of dollars to pay for engineering work), and I'm sure we can get it going again. Heck, I'll even offer to help if there really truly is some evidence that this is a worthwhile venture and not just some hobbyist hackery. (Don't get me wrong, hobbyist hackery is great -- but I've got far too many critical forward looking projects to worry about garage retro computing projects -- that's the demesne of NetBSD. :-) In fact, developer-council met and one of the topics briefly discussed was SPARC. Most of us hate the trouble it is to keep it around, but we agree that we need it. We need it because it keeps us honest (SPARC is both an alternate architecture *and* a big-endian one), and because the backlash that would come about if we yanked it would be -- unfortunate. So we're keeping it alive, if it can truly be considered to be alive even now. Still, none of the distros have taken up the work to build it, so all we have is kernel bits that we *think* work (at least they did the last time I tried, which was a couple of months ago.) > > You're far better off buying a high density modern intel box and then use > virtualisation to consolidate workloads. You just cannot beat the economics. > There is just no viable reason for using SPARC, except perhaps to run legacy > software where no binaries exist for x86. *Some* of that legacy application base is *hugely* important. But its also the case that those apps aren't going to be looking to move to new operating systems any time soon. They just want to keep running. They might want to do so on new hardware. A really good SPARC emulation running on x86 might be a compelling offering for these guys. I'm not aware of any that are robust enough for production right now. There probably *is* a niche, yet valuable, market for such a solution. (Could be a good startup for a very small team of dedicated virtualization engineers with SPARC backgrounds. I think some of the initial work is already done in qemu.) > > Since future SPARC development is now under the stewardship of Oracle, it's > now a proprietary legacy CPU architecture. Does Oracle own "SPARC", or just the only company doing SPARC designs? (Have Fujitsu pulled out entirely of the SPARC space?) > If you buy a new SPARC box, you're giving your money to Oracle and at that > point you may as well run Solaris 10 or 11 on it. That's certainly true. I can't imagine why you'd fork over the premiums to Oracle for their hardware unless you needed their support guarantees that certainly only come with their OS. > The illumos developers have commercial interests wedded on x86, Not all of us are wedded to x86. But the lack of any viable alternatives leaves us there. :-) I'd love to see a high end MIPS or ARM port. I think the problem is that all the chip guys but Intel and AMD are focussed almost entirely on the consumer device space now. (Frankly, its the only way to compete if your a chip mfg. The Windows monopoly still dominates the desktop space. Client devices have a much more level playing field.) > and since the project has no access to modern SPARC equipment like M3000s or > T4s, nor access to the technical specs, there's no real reason for the > illumos developers to expend valuable time and energy on developing for SPARC. We've been offered access to M3000 class hardware. (Not T4.) No specs, and without help from Fujitsu the M-series work would probably be dead in the water. > > So at this point, as far as I'm concerned the people who want SPARC are > hobbyists interested in running old equipment, much like how I like to get > out my Commodore 64 and BBC Micro, or they're lunatics with no grip on > reality. That's a bit ... over the top. But yeah, IMO there is little commercial reason to develop a SPARC distro. Frankly, the lack of one is probably the single most compelling evidence in support of the argument. However, I've got some SPARC experience and expertise, and if someone really wants to do the work, I'm happy to help mentor individuals working on the low level pieces that are still missing. (Please be a reasonably experienced kernel guy though. This isn't a project to cut your kernel teeth on -- I don't have time to handhold a newbie.) > > Secondly, SVR4 is yet another dead end technology. SVR4 packaging was crap > back when it was widely in use, and it's still crap now. OpenIndiana and > OmniOS use IPS, Nexenta/Illumian use deb, and SmartOS dispensed with > packaging entirely. If you have SVR4 packages, rinse them through pkgsend > which will publish them to an IPS repo and problem solved. > > When people talk to me about SVR4, I imagine things like this: > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SunOS_4.1.1_P1270750.jpg Hah, that's SunOS 4.1.1. It was most definitely *not* SVR4, but BSD based. I remember installing that OS from tape. :-) > > Sure, there are people out there with fetishes for cassette tapes and vinyl > records, but they, like the SVR4 fetishists, are in the minority. The > majority of people just want to get work done, and IPS lets you get more work > done faster. I disagree, except that IPS is what we *have* today. We don't have SVR4. This is not intrinsically, IMO, to the vast superiority of IPS, but due to the fact that Oracle made the change, and almost nobody sane has been willing to do the work to revive SVR4. Truth is, we don't need a packaging war. Btw, in *my* commercial product there is *no* packaging whatsoever. The "distro" is a self contained ISO. But, I'm not doing a general purpose operating system either. :-) > If you're pining for SVR4, put your money where your mouth is and fork. I can > guarantee you that the unwashed masses will give your 80s throwback distro a > wide berth. Its been done already. Schillix. Have fun. :-) > > As project lead I can tell you that we won't be doing SPARC unless someone > comes along and takes ownership of that project, and we definitely won't ever > be doing SVR4 packaging as long as I'm project lead. Please be clear, you *only* speak for OpenIndiana and most *definitely* not for illumos. You are not the project lead for illumos. (If there is one at all for illumos, it is me. But as part of the most recent developer council meeting I think basically I agreed that such a title is fairly empty since any meaningful decisions are made by the developer or admin councils.) Other distros can do what they like; we will welcome a reasonable SVR4 port in illumos. (Which isn't to say we will necessarily *use* it.) - Garrett ------------------------------------------- illumos-discuss Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/182180/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/182180/21175430-2e6923be Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21175430&id_secret=21175430-6a77cda4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
