[illumos-Discuss] SPARC

[Frank Middleton]

Just went through the entire discuss and developer mailman
archives, and there's nary a mention of SPARC. There's a whole
slew of SPARC users out there, stuck at b134, wondering what
to do. Sun, even before being acquired, wasn't really disposed
towards supporting older hardware and doubtless this hasn't
changed. As a /very/ long time Solaris user, I'm loth to switch
to BSD (or Linux, where my experience hasn't been that great).

Alan Coopersmith was kind enough to take the time to make the
XSun sources available and I've been busy coming up with a
strategy to get it to build without encumbered code. However,
once this is done, it looks like there might not be an OS to run
it on.

Would it be true that there's no one active at Illumos who has
any interest in SPARC? I see Martin Bochnig is active on these
lists, so there's probably at least one. I'd be only happy to dive in
and try what ironically may be a port /to/ SPARC when the appropriate
time comes. It may be too early to ask some of these questions, but:

o Is Illumos interested at all in directly or indirectly supporting
     a SPARC distribution? Currently Martux is the only OSol distro
     for SPARC and IIRC it relies heavily on BSD and hasn't been updated
     in quite a while. I believe it also depends on encumbered code. I
     have no idea if Martin has any plans to revive Martux using the
     Illumos code base, but if he does, and needs some help...

o Using GCC for kernel building on SPARC has been spotty. If
    Illumos plans to migrate away from Sun Studio, this could have
    a significant impact on maintaining SPARC support. Not sure
    how to mitigate this other than actually building a SPARC distro.
  
o  Do you need help testing things like the ports of sed and iconv
     on SPARC? I'm kinda busy with the XSun thing, but keeping
     the SPARC alive might need to be ongoing...

o I subscribed to announce, discuss, and developer. Presumably one
    or more of those lists will indicate when the time has come to
    actually try to build a distribution - my guess is that that time
    may be a little way off.  Is there a hoped-for date?

Thanks -- Frank