‘Staggering’ cost of vintage Sun workstations sees OpenSolaris fork Illumos drop SPARC support
- Reference: 1620626230
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/05/10/illumos_deprecates_sparc_support/
- Source link:
A [1]README posted to GitHub says the decision to drop SPARC is rooted in the fact that the OS was written for silicon that hasn’t been sold for a decade.
“The most recent SPARC machines for which we have relatively direct and complete support were contemporary at the time of the fork; viz., the UltraSPARC T2 family of servers, such as the T5120 and T5220,” wrote Illumos core team member Joshua M Clulow. “The last of these systems reached their end-of-life between 2011 and 2012.”
[2]
[3]
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“In the decade hence, the size and quality of the pool of second hand systems available through eBay and other vendors has dwindled, and prices have risen to match. Desktop systems in particular are popular for collectors, and are thus now staggeringly expensive if you can find them at all.”
Clulow says old Sun kit is now so expensive that the Illumos team “does not currently have access to a permanent official SPARC build machine.”
The developer says cross-compilation and emulation have both been considered, but dismissed because they’d require an awful lot of work and even then the results would not be great.
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“In theory one might emulate SPARC systems with QEMU, but reports in the field suggest that this does not work well enough to run modern illumos,” Clulow wrote. “Even if it did, it may take a very long time -- e.g., weeks! -- to build the operating system under full emulation.”
He also points out that it’s become clear nobody cares enough to keep Illumos-on-SPARC alive.
“If a community of users was going to emerge to provide engineering effort and build resources for SPARC, it likely would have done so by now.”
[6]
“It is always sad to close a chapter in our history, and SPARC systems represent a strong and positive memory for many of us. Nonetheless, the time has arrived to begin the process of removing SPARC support from the operating system.”
[7]'It's dead, Jim': Torvalds marks Intel Itanium processors as orphaned in Linux kernel
[8]Oracle exhumes ‘Older, Still Useful Content’ penned by Solaris and SPARC veterans
[9]Oracle starts to lose patience with Solaris holdouts
[10]IBM teases new AIX release – the first since 2015
Illumos came into being in 2010 when, as The Register [11]reported , OpenSolaris developers tired of Oracle’s indifference to their efforts. So they decided to make a properly open version of the OS, but to keep contributing to the OpenSolaris core tended by Oracle. We therefore described Illumos as a “spork” as the dev team was both staying close to Oracle – we used the term “spooning” – while also creating a new project.
The strategy delivered an OS with support for SPARC, plus 32-bit and 64-bit x86. 32-bit x86 support was dropped in 2018.
Now SPARC support is also on the way out. ®
Get our [12]Tech Resources
[1] https://github.com/illumos/ipd/blob/master/ipd/0019/README.md
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YJkEPMIb5pI-@VKs7ldDlwAAAA4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
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[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YJkEPMIb5pI-@VKs7ldDlwAAAA4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YJkEPMIb5pI-@VKs7ldDlwAAAA4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] http://www.theregister.com/2021/02/01/linux_pulls_itanium_support/
[8] http://www.theregister.com/2021/01/29/oracle_restores_sparc_solaris_content/
[9] http://www.theregister.com/2020/10/15/solaris_support_changes/
[10] http://www.theregister.com/2021/02/24/aix_7_3_announced/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2010/08/03/illumos_opensolaris_spork/
[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
And the servers were a nice purple colour :-)
That was a really long time ago, because all SPARC workstations from the U5 onward were at least overpriced, and most of them were also pure crap.
/somebody who had to work on a Sun Blade 100 from 2005 to 2009 while managing older workstations
We found that £2000 x86 blade servers with Linux outperformed our £20,000 SPARC servers. We didn't buy any more after that.
Will continue in another form
While SPARC will be removed from upstream, that isn't quite the end of illumos on SPARC. Tribblix will simply fork illumos and continue with it's illumos on SPARC distribution from what will then essentially be a static base. Makes life easier on both sides - illumos mainstream can evolve more aggressively, and those of us using unchanging SPARC hardware can evolve much more slowly.
Re: Will continue in another form
Tribblix - Apart from the rapid reproduction, just like Tribbles!
"They are depicted as a small, furry, gentle, attractive, and slow-moving but rapidly reproducing lovable species."
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribble
Have you considered a character like Tux for the project, based on the likeness of a Tribble?
[2]http://tribblix.org/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribble
[2] http://tribblix.org/
Pity I scapped all my old SPARC desktops, instead of trying ebay.
Still, the models supported by illumos are very old. Oracle and Fujitsu still make new SPARC boxes with more modern processors, but there's so little demand for desktops that the video driver support is minimal now.
I have a bunch of SPARC desktops and servers that have been gathering dust in a basement (along with my collection of acquired SGIs, all waiting for a time that I never had to bring them to life) which I'd been thinking to scrap. Maybe I'll try eBay instead...
I have a couple of old Sun monitors here, the only reason they are not in a skip is because they are the size of a skip :-)
I never thought I’d see the day
From what I see you should rename that thing to WooCrypt.
"Foo was here"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo_was_here
Since when is Post-Quantum-Cryptography a conspiracy theory ?
Given your obvious anger at Quantum+ Proof / Solutions, you must be one of the 'intelligent' ones in the law enforcement or intelligence communities, that do nothing but complain about how BAD privacy and data protection is via Encryption Based Solutions.
You also appear to have no concept of eCommerce solutions.
would you have a bridge for me to buy now?
Anyone with a bridge for sale should write to
Boris Johnson
10 Downing Street
London
Great Britain
Enclosing a voucher redeemable for goods at a now well known expensive wallpaper emporium will ensure your application will get prompt attention
Jeremy Fleming @ G.C.H.Q. needs a bridge more than Boris does
so much sparc kit was skipped
I have the front plate for a Sparc server sat on the radiator in my home office. I kept it when a large trenche (4s fully populated DC racks I think) of end of life Sparc servers were being sent to the recyclers. We were getting pennies for them at the time, and were using recyclers as they would provide a certificate of destruction for the disk arrays. The business case for paying to have the discs securely recycled and sell the diskless servers (with no O/S) just didn't stack up. the time required to unrack then pack the servers into boxes rather than wheel them out to the loading bay alone was more than we would have got for the servers. Unfortunately a lot of perfectly good but end of life servers went the same way so they are now very rare. I do wish I had kept a couple but I just dint have the space.
And another stalwart bites the dust.
Hamba Kahle.
And they were really good heaters..
I used to hug them when I was stuck in a cold server room.
Re: And they were really good heaters..
Quite. A lot of the illumos on SPARC support was done on the handful of machines in my home office. They would never get turned on if it was a warm summer day, but came in quite useful in the middle of winter.
It wasn't that long ago we decommissioned our UltraSPARC IIs... Spares came from eBay for years. We replaced it, unsurprisingly with X86_64.
There wasn't really any choice in the matter, the price tag associated with current SPARC is utterly obscene; no matter how well designed they are.
Ah happy days
Remember when things were brought up and just stayed up? Year in, year out.
Desktop computing at its best.
Sad but understandable. We have good memories of the Sun SPARC machines of the day, well built and reliable compared to the cheap (and not so cheap) x86 boxes we had. But in time they became too expensive for the performance offered and Linux became pretty good.
Then Oracle took over and it was clear fairly quickly that no more Sun Oracle kit would be bought or used.