Greetings,
I recently found out about the plans to remove the Xsun consolidation
(sometime in the future) from Solaris, as Sun will be porting "relevant"
graphics drivers to Xorg. Of course, "relevance" is a highly subjective
term, and I feel that this will leave SPARC enthusiasts like myself
being forced to run an ancient version of Solaris to receive some
measure of usability from our old, but still worthwhile SPARC hardware.
I think Sun should strongly consider not EOLing these framebuffers (even
the TGX), as the hardware that is capable of using these framebuffers
(SBus UltraSPARC-II systems) is still supported (please, don't tell me
support is going to end for these, either :-). EOLing the only
framebuffers these systems are capable of using seems wrong on too many
levels.
I'd like to see possible solutions brought up within this thread other
than just a blunt EOL being stamped on "non-relevant" framebuffers
(framebuffers that Sun no longer profits from). Possible solutions in my
mind are to port these ancient framebuffer drivers (maybe not TGX, but
at least the bulk of the PCI/UPA ones) to Xorg. I'm not certain, but the
last time I used Linux on SPARC, which was about 4 years ago on my
SPARCstation 5, XFree86 worked fine on the TGX framebuffer. Is Sun not
interested in including and maintaining these already pre-existing
drivers in their Xorg consolidation?
I really hate to say it, but it certainly seems the case that opening up
Solaris has put a nail (or rather two) in the coffin of old SPARC
systems (even SPARC systems that aren't actually *that* old -- like my
SB1000, which has an Elite3D framebuffer in it). Prior to opening up
Solaris, Sun at least had an excuse to maintain and use proprietary
drivers and consolidations, but now that everything is out in the open
Sun must migrate to open equivalents, like Xorg. This I can certainly
understand, but I doubt any of us that advocated for OpenSolaris and at
the same time were SPARC enthusiasts had this in mind for our completely
useful (albeit, slightly dated) hardware. If anything when we advocated
for and adopted OpenSolaris we wanted to *gain* usability (not lose it)
for our hardware by having access to the source.
Thanks,
--
Derek E. Lewis
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://riemann.solnetworks.net/~dlewis
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