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 delewis at acm.org http://riemann.solnetworks.net/~dlewis
