[illumos-Developer] ON is bloated and a bunch of stuff that doesn't need to be there should be ripped out (was Re: Heads up: perl 5.8.4 removal)

[Andre van Eyssen]

On Thu, 11 Nov 2010, Edho P Arief wrote:

>> SunOS-4.x support depends on kernel callbacks.
>>
>
> not even in a vm?

Obviously a complete virtual environment would take care of the kernel 
requirements because you can run a kernel with support in a VM. However, 
running old releases in a VM is out of scope for a discussion of Illumos 
future support.

Even with my appreciation of long-term binary compatibility, I think the 
time has passed for SunOS 4 binary compatibility. Other changes have crept 
in that break old SunOS software like WordPerfect even on Solaris 10 and 
really I haven't seen application demand from anyone for SunOS 4 vintage 
apps. I believe anyone with a critical need for such applications should 
be in a good position to keep running Solaris 10 (or earlier!) on real 
hardware.

Given the performance of machines from the SunOS 4 era, even an old V100 
is good enough to keep these things running.

I think we should let the developer-council think about the decision and 
work with their course of action. If a compelling reason for retention of 
such support appears, I'd urge people to post a case study.

-- 
Andre van Eyssen.
mail: andre at purplecow.org          jabber: andre at interact.purplecow.org
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