Sound crazy. Like if Windows had dropped x86.
Illumos to drop SPARC Support
21–30 of 184 posts
Re: Illumos to drop SPARC Support
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's mildly interesting to me that there's now really no notable big-endian systems left, yet that's still the network byte order. I wonder what the math is for the amount of global wasted CPU cycles on byte-swapping for things that would do a fair amount of that...DNS for example.
> It's mildly interesting to me that there's now really no notable big-endian systems left That's not correct. s390x is big-endian and well supported in all enterprise distributions such as SLE, RHEL as well as Debian and Ubuntu.
Notable in terms of global cpu capacity. Linux on zSeries is interesting, but only makes financial sense in some pretty limited scenarios.
Re: Illumos to drop SPARC Support
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's mildly interesting to me that there's now really no notable big-endian systems left, yet that's still the network byte order. I wonder what the math is for the amount of global wasted CPU cycles on byte-swapping for things that would do a fair amount of that...DNS for example.
IIRC ARM devices can also be big-endian and GCC can even generate big endian 64-bit ARM code: https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/AArch64-Options.html
Yeah, you can find an ARM big endian distribution of, for example NetBSD. No Linux that I can find. Apparently boot issues are a bit tricky.
Re: Illumos to drop SPARC Support
#24While the primary issue is likely developer time and hardware availability to test on, there are other OSs like OpenBSD which supports much newer SPARC64 hardware: https://www.openbsd.org/sparc64.html
OpenBSD is the only OS ever to run on my Tadpole laptops without any modification necessary. Even Solaris 8 and 10 needed special software to run on them. OpenBSD works right out of the box.
Re: Illumos to drop SPARC Support
#25This is really sad. The world is heading to a duopoly x86 - arm. Alpha is dead, Mips is almost dead, PA-RISC is dead, POWER is too expensive and RISC-V is mostly nice to have.
Yes, but where can I buy a SPARC CPU? How many of those who have/can have it are running Illumos and are putting money/time in it? And more importantly what's the outlook for SPARC?
Re: Illumos to drop SPARC Support
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
x86: 8086 1978 x64: 1999 ARM: 1985 ARM64: 2011 RISC V: 2010 It took x86 about 10 years (1988) to become the most popular, and until 2005 to cause Apple to switch (another 17 years) It took ARM about 25 years (2010) to become the most popular, and until 2020 to cause Apple to switch (another 10 years)
“Switch” to what? Apple is one of the founders of ARM and still holds ARM shares IIRC
They sold their 40% stake in ARM when they were short of cash.
Switch from Power PC to Intel, and then from Intel to ARM. I'm using Apple as a tipping point, to when the new architecture was so much better than the old it completely took over. Obviously with 90% of Apple devices being ARM already it was an easier choice for them this time. But as each Architecture gets more power as the market is many times bigger, it may be more difficult for the new entrant.
That's why RISC V's win (if it occurs) will be because it's Open Source. Linux won in 30 years against everyone else due to that.
Re: Illumos to drop SPARC Support
#27This is really sad. The world is heading to a duopoly x86 - arm. Alpha is dead, Mips is almost dead, PA-RISC is dead, POWER is too expensive and RISC-V is mostly nice to have.
A lot of these architecture have some drawbacks in modern times. Alpha’s loosey-goosey memory model makes multithreaded code on SMP systems more challenging. Linux utilizes its Alpha port as a worst-case testbed for data race conditions in its kernel. SPARC’s register windows are anachronistic and complicate the implementation of CPUs, and I’d guess also make it more difficult to build OoOE cores (so many SPARC chips…
> Linux utilizes its Alpha port as a worst-case testbed for data race conditions in its kernel.
Is that still true in the present tense? Anybody doing this in 2021? Seems like alpha has been dead for a long time.
Re: Illumos to drop SPARC Support
#28This is really sad. The world is heading to a duopoly x86 - arm. Alpha is dead, Mips is almost dead, PA-RISC is dead, POWER is too expensive and RISC-V is mostly nice to have.
It was only a few years ago that the world was heading to an x86 monopoly.
Re: Illumos to drop SPARC Support
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's mildly interesting to me that there's now really no notable big-endian systems left, yet that's still the network byte order. I wonder what the math is for the amount of global wasted CPU cycles on byte-swapping for things that would do a fair amount of that...DNS for example.
> It's mildly interesting to me that there's now really no notable big-endian systems left That's not correct. s390x is big-endian and well supported in all enterprise distributions such as SLE, RHEL as well as Debian and Ubuntu.
Though as we recently learned, it's considered sufficiently "fringe" by a big chunk of the development community that it's not that big a deal to drop support for it. (Not to imply IBM couldn't be sponsoring development for it more).
Re: Illumos to drop SPARC Support
#30This is really sad. The world is heading to a duopoly x86 - arm. Alpha is dead, Mips is almost dead, PA-RISC is dead, POWER is too expensive and RISC-V is mostly nice to have.
A lot of these architecture have some drawbacks in modern times. Alpha’s loosey-goosey memory model makes multithreaded code on SMP systems more challenging. Linux utilizes its Alpha port as a worst-case testbed for data race conditions in its kernel. SPARC’s register windows are anachronistic and complicate the implementation of CPUs, and I’d guess also make it more difficult to build OoOE cores (so many SPARC chips…
You could even build your own Power ISA system with Microwatt, which is fully synthesizeable and growing by leaps and bounds.
https://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt
(Disclaimer: minor contributor)
I really liked PA-RISC. I thought it was a clean ISA with good performance at the time and avoided many of the pitfalls of other implementations. I think HP didn't want to pour lots of money into it to keep it competitive, though, and was happy to bail out for Itanium when it was viable. My big C8000 is a power hungry titan, makes the Quad G5 seem thrifty.