I'd like to know what the current plans are for supporting AI/Indiana on
non-WANboot capable SPARC systems (i.e. OBP before 4.17). The AI design
notes indicate that there may be NFS support in the future, which would be
a requirement for supportable installation on older SPARC systems. While I
know about a couple of published hacks to achieve an Indiana installation
on such systems, they are just that: hacks.
The reason I'm asking is that I've been working on the (trivial) changes
for
6414867 Revive UltraSPARC I support
but it probably doesn't make much sense to have them integrated into Nevada
if Indiana is going to drop support for many more older (still far more
recent) systems by upholding the WANboot requirement. I'd consider such a
requirement a fatal flaw since many of the affected systems (like a Blade
1000) are perfectly capable of running OpenSolaris and such a decision
would unnecessarily deter many developers.
Regards.
Rainer
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Rainer Orth, Faculty of Technology, Bielefeld University
