Rainer Orth wrote:
>> referring to PSARC 2009/572, that *was* run as closed, and I happen to
>> share your sentiment.)
>
> Indeed I was, and I consider this to be a slap in the community's face: it
> is well known that some non-Sun distributions added my hack to re-enable
> UltraSPARC I support, and I have a sponsor to have it added back to
> Nevada. So there is considerable community interest, and this is being
> sneaked in like this ;-( Not what I consider proper procedure.
Sorry - as the sponsor for that case, I am partly to blame for not working
harder to try to find some way to make it open, but in the end all that case
really said was the business decision of Sun will support in it's supported
releases and what it will notify it's customers will be supported or not by
Sun under their support contracts, so there wasn't really much to open.
It actually specified exactly 0 code changes, leaving those to each
consolidation to manage. Should consolidations with open code choose to
leave that present, but not built for Sun's distros, that is a perfectly
reasonable choice from my point of view, though a departure from the way
they've always managed their gates before. (While it's OpenSolaris, the
ON gates managed by Sun have always viewed it as a bug to have code in them
that Sun wasn't using or testing - whether that is a good policy long term
or not is an excellent discussion to have somewhere like on-discuss, since
that's not really the sort of thing the ARC has covered in the past. Other
consolidations have had differing policies, especially those that bring in
code from outside/upstream projects.)
> (Although one could have imagined that at least *some* of the systems in the
field could be supported if they have one of the few remaining supported SPARC
graphics cards -- I think the XVR-100 is one such.)
XVR-100 will continue to be supported (for now), and users can probably get
systems with it running, even if they can't buy a support contract from Sun
for the workstation it's in for future releases. Whether or not other drivers
for those systems are present depends on whether someone in ON or other
consolidations (SPARC networking) brings forward EOF cases for them as
Garrett just did for the stp4020 & bpp drivers and as SPARC graphics has
done for the SPARC graphics drivers.
--
-Alan Coopersmith- alan.coopersmith at sun.com
Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering
