One of the main benefits of open source is to encourage folks to develop
support for obscure or obsolete equipment. So yes, we strongly
encourage the community to port older drivers to X.org. If you want to
include those in opensolaris.org, that's relatively easy to do as well.
We, Sun, are not opposed to that at all.
As for support, keep in mind that Sun does not support OpenSolaris per
se, but rather our OpenSolaris-based distro, Solaris. The way that EOL
works for Solaris is as follows:
* There are (at least) 90 days from the EOL announcement to the last
order date.
* There are then (at least) another 90 days from last order to last
ship date.
* There is 5 years support from the last ship date: 2 years patch
support + 3 years phone support.
* Extended patch support is negotiable on a time & materials basis.
Derek E. Lewis wrote:
Greetings,
I recently found out about the plans to remove the Xsun consolidation
(sometime in the future) from Solaris, as Sun will be porting
"relevant" graphics drivers to Xorg. Of course, "relevance" is a
highly subjective term, and I feel that this will leave SPARC
enthusiasts like myself being forced to run an ancient version of
Solaris to receive some measure of usability from our old, but still
worthwhile SPARC hardware.
I think Sun should strongly consider not EOLing these framebuffers
(even the TGX), as the hardware that is capable of using these
framebuffers (SBus UltraSPARC-II systems) is still supported (please,
don't tell me support is going to end for these, either :-). EOLing
the only framebuffers these systems are capable of using seems wrong
on too many levels.
I'd like to see possible solutions brought up within this thread other
than just a blunt EOL being stamped on "non-relevant" framebuffers
(framebuffers that Sun no longer profits from). Possible solutions in
my mind are to port these ancient framebuffer drivers (maybe not TGX,
but at least the bulk of the PCI/UPA ones) to Xorg. I'm not certain,
but the last time I used Linux on SPARC, which was about 4 years ago
on my SPARCstation 5, XFree86 worked fine on the TGX framebuffer. Is
Sun not interested in including and maintaining these already
pre-existing drivers in their Xorg consolidation?
I really hate to say it, but it certainly seems the case that opening
up Solaris has put a nail (or rather two) in the coffin of old SPARC
systems (even SPARC systems that aren't actually *that* old -- like my
SB1000, which has an Elite3D framebuffer in it). Prior to opening up
Solaris, Sun at least had an excuse to maintain and use proprietary
drivers and consolidations, but now that everything is out in the open
Sun must migrate to open equivalents, like Xorg. This I can certainly
understand, but I doubt any of us that advocated for OpenSolaris and
at the same time were SPARC enthusiasts had this in mind for our
completely useful (albeit, slightly dated) hardware. If anything when
we advocated for and adopted OpenSolaris we wanted to *gain* usability
(not lose it) for our hardware by having access to the source.
Thanks,
--
Stephen Harpster
Director, Open Source Software
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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