I wish someone would do something about Xorg support on SPARC. The fact that customers who have already spent the $$$ on a nice workstation and graphics cards will have to either stay on S10/Solaris Express or buy a new setup is unacceptable. There does seem to be a disconnect between customers and Sun on the workstation front. For example, the fact that Sun still has not come out with a workstation running something better than a US-IIIi processor over the years is a pretty sad state of events. I'm sure there are many sysadmins, developers, students, etc. that would love to see a cheap (<$1500) Niagara workstation with 3d graphics to work on. Not to mention the commercial applications (printing/raster processing, medical scanning equipment, visualization for oil/space/chem/etc.), that run on SPARC today using older equipment.
The prices on the SB1500/2500 are obscene, not to mention the costs of descent graphics cards. This is why there is a huge market for used Sun workstations today (just visit eBay, anysystem.com, etc.). Sun really needs to address this if they want people to develop software for the SPARC platform. It's really hurting the eco-system. Besides, it's not like Sun is making much money on the x64 gear (server or otherwise) when compared with the SPARC sales (T-Series alone makes it king). It just blows my mind how Sun is ignoring the market for new low-cost SPARC workstations. Seeing the same issues pop up again for Xorg makes it even worse. If Sun dumps XSun for the next Solaris release, it'll nix OS upgrades for a lot of customers, developers, etc. Hell, with Sun's AMD relationship, I don't see any reason why there can't be a ATI 3D PCI card with OBP support made just to help customers switch to Xorg. I can't imagine a card like that being more than $300, unless someone is making the chips in their garage by hand! This message posted from opensolaris.org
