I suppose it would be silly to ask why XSun couldn't be left in? I daresay that forcing all the loyal Sparc base to BSD or whatever probably won't help the Open Solaris cause a whole lot. ZFS may be the only reason to stay with it, and once that is ported, why put up with the other aggravations? Open Solaris has been horribly unstable for quite a while, but now (at least as of snv103) it seems pretty solid. Part of this is surely due to all the unpaid users who have been contributing any way they can, and this is the way Open Source works. I understand that supporting obsolete hardware is probably not an option, but dumping your most loyal users may not be a great decision.
It just occurred to me that Open Solaris is supposed to be well, open source. Is there any reason why the Sparc community couldn't do their own port? I, for one, have a lot of C experience, although none with writing video drivers. I would be willing to invest time in working on a port and I am sure there are others who would, too. If Sun were to release the information we'd need to do such a port, what would it take to get the effort going? Actually, I suppose the BSD folks must have video drivers for their Sparc o/s. I wonder if their drivers might be a good base. With a modicum of support from Sun, I bet this could be done... On 03/17/09 13:11, Alan Coopersmith wrote: > Randy Jones wrote: >> What this means is that all Blade 2500/2000/1500/1000 owners with XVR-1200 or >> XVR-600 graphics are left out. I would venture to say that there are a LOT >> more sparc >> boxes with XVR-600 or XVR-1200 than U45's or U25's with XVR-2500. >> >> Why won't Sun port the XVR-600/XVR-1200 drivers? > > The estimated cost outweighs the estimated profit in supporting cards > that haven't been sold in 3-4 years. > > Perhaps you haven't heard, but Sun has had to cut thousands of employees and > thus lots of projects recently, and can't afford to do everything people > would like to see, even if we'd like to see it too in an ideal world. > It sucks, but it's reality. > > Should enough customers convince their sales reps they'd be somehow spending > more money with Sun (which I guess would have to be OpenSolaris support > contracts for large numbers of systems, since again, these are boards no > longer sold or produced), those estimates could change to convince the > business people that it's worthwhile to do the port. >
