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Illumos to drop SPARC Support

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Re: Illumos to drop SPARC Support

#51

Post by cyberpunk »

wicket wrote: post #32

With Linux having caught up with key Solaris features in recent years (DTrace -> eBPF, Zones -> Namespaces, ZFS -> ZFS on Linux), I always thought that the main reason to use Illumos would be first-class SPARC support. With that now dropped, I'm concerned that Illumos soon become irrelevant. Are there any compelling reasons left to use Illumos, other than being something for those who just want a free Solaris alterna…

Not really. SmartOS was nice for a while but tbh you may as well go with openstack or proxmox these days.

I used it for hosting a lot of java over the years but these days everyone wants a k8s endpoint and really the kind of hypervisor you are running doesn’t really make a difference.

Shame, it was nice tech.

Re: Illumos to drop SPARC Support

#52

Post by rjsw »

tyingq wrote: post #23
pabs3 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm fairly sure that NetBSD/arm switches to big endian once the kernel is running, the boot process is unchanged.

Re: Illumos to drop SPARC Support

#53

Post by rjsw »

PedroBatista wrote: post #25
hulitu wrote: post #3

This 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?

I have SPARC systems, I run NetBSD on them though not Illumos.

Re: Illumos to drop SPARC Support

#54

Post by cyberpunk »

cptnapalm wrote: post #24
zdw wrote: post #14

While 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.

SPARC was where Theo cut his teeth in the netbsd years, anecdotal but I think it’s his favourite pet so you’d imagine it’ll be well supported on his os

Re: Illumos to drop SPARC Support

#55

Post by rjsw »

spijdar wrote: post #48
1over137 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Illumos is a BSD, so perhaps, like other BSDs, they don't want to rely on GPLv3 projects like (current) gcc.

Illumos is a fork of Solaris, itself a UNIX System V derived OS, very much not a BSD, though taking some code from BSD. I'm not sure what license they make new additions under, but the core is CDDL licensed and not BSD licensed, anyway. (side tangent FWIW, NetBSD has no qualms with using GPLv3 GCC, only Free/Open do) (Edit for another historical tangent: Sun helped create System V release 4, which specifically combin…

NetBSD can optionally be built with LLVM/Clang. It can be cross-compiled using either toolchain.

Re: Illumos to drop SPARC Support

#56

Post by spijdar »

rjsw wrote: post #55
spijdar wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Illumos is a fork of Solaris, itself a UNIX System V derived OS, very much not a BSD, though taking some code from BSD. I'm not sure what license they make new additions under, but the core is CDDL licensed and not BSD licensed, anyway. (side tangent FWIW, NetBSD has no qualms with using GPLv3 GCC, only Free/Open do) (Edit for another historical tangent: Sun helped create System V release 4, which specifically combin…

NetBSD can optionally be built with LLVM/Clang. It can be cross-compiled using either toolchain.

Well, yes -- it's nice and portable like that. I think at some point they got it building with PCC and TCC too?

My point is unlike the other BSDs they haven't made a point of deprecating/removing GCC from the source tree, or even using LLVM by default where they can. For third parties worried about GPLv3, you can easily delete all GPLv3 code with a rm -rf src/external/gpl3 :)

Re: Illumos to drop SPARC Support

#57

Post by mrweasel »

zdw wrote: post #14

While 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

I can’t really tell if they’re just dropping older SPARC systems or the architecture altogther.

OpenBSD will eventually face the same issues with older systems, and I believe they already dropped platforms because hardware couldn’t be replaced.

For newer SPARC system you could “just” buy one. Oracle doesn’t need to donate them, it would be nice if they did, but the community around Illumos, Debian and OpenBSD could raise money to buy theses systems.

Re: Illumos to drop SPARC Support

#58

Post by insaneirish »

bombcar wrote: post #38
tyingq wrote: post #5

Earlier 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.

There are various open-source and white-box network switches and routers - do any of them run big-endian? If not, it must be a solved problem (perhaps by fast-path dedicated ASICs).

> If not, it must be a solved problem (perhaps by fast-path dedicated ASICs).

Correct. The data plane of all 'real' networking is done in ASICs and/or NPUs.

Re: Illumos to drop SPARC Support

#59

Post by rjsw »

spijdar wrote: post #56
rjsw wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NetBSD can optionally be built with LLVM/Clang. It can be cross-compiled using either toolchain.

Well, yes -- it's nice and portable like that. I think at some point they got it building with PCC and TCC too? My point is unlike the other BSDs they haven't made a point of deprecating/removing GCC from the source tree, or even using LLVM by default where they can. For third parties worried about GPLv3, you can easily delete all GPLv3 code with a rm -rf src/external/gpl3 :)

LLVM doesn't support all the CPU architectures that GCC does, ones missing include 68k, VAX and SH3.

Re: Illumos to drop SPARC Support

#60

Post by jsiepkes »

wicket wrote: post #32

With Linux having caught up with key Solaris features in recent years (DTrace -> eBPF, Zones -> Namespaces, ZFS -> ZFS on Linux), I always thought that the main reason to use Illumos would be first-class SPARC support. With that now dropped, I'm concerned that Illumos soon become irrelevant. Are there any compelling reasons left to use Illumos, other than being something for those who just want a free Solaris alterna…

In my opinion Linux hasn't caught up.

* Namespaces don't come close to FreeBSD jails or Solaris / Illumos Zones. There is a reason Docker hosters put their Docker tenants in different hardware VM's. Because the isolation is too weak.

* Due to CDDL and GPL problems ZFS on Linux will always be hard to use making every update cycle like playing Russian roulette.

And there are other benefits. Like SMF offers nice service management while not providing half an operating system like systemd.

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