The problem is finding a reliable distribution that can build and host illumos-gate.
There are a few distros that have some effort here — Igor Kozhukov maintains DiLOS that I think has SPARC support, but it comes with debian packaging and is quite experimental. I believe Peter Tribble has made some progress with SPARC on his Tribblix distribution, but again I think it doesn’t use the same packaging system (legacy SVR4 in this case I believe) and is probably very experimental (I believe it has only Peter working on it at the moment.) Probably the single biggest thing to help SPARC that any individual could do would be to figure out how to get one of the mainstream distros like OpenIndiana or OmniOS built for it — including installation media. Given installable ISOs, I suspect that many of the other barriers will fall away. (The problem with OI has always been lack of sufficiently interested people to do the rather large job of keeping a functional SPARC build of their distribution alive.) Omni is maintained by OmniTI, and I believe they are strictly an x86 shop.) The *other* thing that would be enormously useful would be figuring out if we can boot any opensolaris on a qemu system running on any of illumos-x86, MacOS, or Linux. (Ideally it shouldn’t matter that much, but I don’t know how easy it is to use qemu SPARC emulations on different systems.) While this would be quite slow, I doubt it would be a lot slower than some actual SPARC hardware, when used with a very fast modern x86 CPU on the host. :-) The “modern” SPARC systems that are faster, produced by Oracle, are sadly unsupported (and possibly unsupportable!) due to lack of documentation and code to support them, never mind sufficient money to own them or host them in data centers with the requisite power and cooling. (The corollaries about the overall usefulness of SPARC in general are left as an exercise to the reader.) - Garrett > On Nov 20, 2014, at 4:27 PM, Lloyd Dewolf via illumos-discuss > <[email protected]> wrote: > > I'm a bit of an outsider myself to illumos, but have been following > the related mailing lists and some of the change logs for about six > months. It is clear to me that there are a few very active maintainers > of illumos on sparc hardware and from patch reviews illumos > contributors confirm changes continue to be compatible on sparc. > > My read has been that things might get gnarly if you are looking for > sparc support on the desktop and deeper into that user land. > > > ------------------------------------------- > illumos-discuss > Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/182180/=now > RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/182180/22003744-9012f59c > Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?&; > Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com ------------------------------------------- illumos-discuss Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/182180/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/182180/21175430-2e6923be Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21175430&id_secret=21175430-6a77cda4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
