Rainer Orth wrote: > James Carlson <carls...@workingcode.com> writes: > >>> "Everybody" is subjective. Case in point : UltraSPARC 1. Lots of >>> people want it. Lots more people think its pointless at this late date, >>> and Sun doesn't want it in ON because they don't want to support it >>> anymore (for good reason, actually!) >>> >>> Who's right? >> And when VM and dtrace and ZFS and others in ON make optimizations that >> are either inapplicable or just downright incompatible with UltraSPARC >> 1, what exactly will you do? >> >> That was a very big part of the reason for shutting down UltraSPARC 1: >> to make things easier on those other project teams, so that they don't >> have to lug around the burden of long-dead hardware. > >>From my understanding, it was not. UltraSPARC I support was dropped when > 32-bit SPARC was removed. The fact that US-I machines run perfectly fine > in 64-bit mode (and have been since Solaris 7) wasn't taken into > consideration. Yes, there was a small risk, but at least you had the > choice. With the wholesale removal, you didn't any longer.
There's more to it than that. Yes, dropping 32-bit kernel support was an important issue, as keeping it would be a substantial burden to other project teams (dtrace, for example, would need new hot patching procedures for trace points for those few still using 32-bit mode kernels). And not all US-I actually does work right with 64-bit mode due to bugs, meaning some complexity in support. More importantly, it would mean that project teams doing extensive kernel work (such as the ones already named) would have to do testing on old US-I machines, which at least at Sun are getting harder and harder to find. They break down and can't be repaired due to a lack of parts. They are expensive in terms of lab real estate, power, and heat. They've long since fallen off the price list. They're very slow and usually very limited in memory and disk space, and thus make poor test machines. Many can't even boot the installer anymore. In other words, "choice" is never a free attribute. It always has some cost associated with it -- sometimes very high cost, and usually a multiplicative effect. (Having N independent choices often means nearly 2^N costs, not N*M costs.) When you add to that the fact that the marginal utility is extremely small -- existing machines can reasonably run S9 or older and continue doing so until the magic smoke escapes with little benefit from OpenSolaris -- and that those still using US-I likely have little money to spend on new hardware, the costs far exceed the value, which is (in large measure) how such support decisions are made. I realize there's a hobbyist market out there for the ZX81's of the workstation world, but it's not a place I'd expect any company to spend its money. -- James Carlson 42.703N 71.076W <carls...@workingcode.com> _______________________________________________ opensolaris-code mailing list opensolaris-code@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/opensolaris-code
