Debian may drop the SPARC architecture

in linux on 2014-04-30 19:17 (#3JJ)

Reported by LWN :

As of tonight, there is no more SPARC in testing. The main reasons were
lack of porter commitments, problems with the toolchain and continued
stability issues with our machines.

The fate of SPARC in unstable has not been decided yet. It might get
removed unless people commit to working on it. Discussion about this
should take place on #745938 .

Oracle (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-04-30 22:04 (#19R)

So "¦ Oracle has kind of been like the kiss of death for this platform. I like SPARC because it's interesting and because it's not x86, which despite its ubiquity I find boring and poorly organized and kludgy at best.

But Oracle isn't an OS developer, SPARC has been left to rot in the gallows, and the users are going elsewhere. Too bad, SPARC, say hi to all those other interesting-but-dead architectures out there. [Posted from my Pentium IV, which has burned a hole through my desk and is now melting its way through the concrete.]

Re: Oracle (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-05-01 07:01 (#19V)

The platform actually does quite well with Solaris at the moment. Oracle is investing insane amounts of money for chip developments and to make their database run faster on SPARC. But sadly Oracle has little interest in maintaining any kind of support under Linux for its hardware AFAIK, and also killed OpenSolaris. Hobbyists also don't get SPARC hardware anymore these days because everything Sun has become very old and newer ones are very expensive. The T4 and later are hugely overpriced on ebay with maybe >10K$.

It'll become increasingly difficult to use your old Sun hardware though. Debian and Gentoo were the only two Linux distributions left with SPARC support IIRC.

Re: Oracle (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-05-01 15:19 (#1A4)

and I seriously doubt many people still own old Sun hardware AND still want to use it. I have a Sun Ultra 10 Workstation but its gathering dust for a few years. It's a shame though considering it's almost 15 years old it feels blazingly fast in comparison to the commodity ARM boards you can find everywhere these days.

Title (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-04-30 22:58 (#19T)

I believe you mean SPARChitecture.