[rescue] FreeBSD, was Re: [geeks] Solaris being discontinued? Rumors flying

[Kevin Bowling]

I don't think you've even done platform development, your comments
certainly don't paint that picture.  It is grueling, unglamorous, and if
not done prior to launch of a large commercial effort a cost center for
everyone involved, including the opportunity cost when commercial and
especially volunteer systems developers are not exactly plentiful.  New
people interested in learning are going to focus on RISC-V or ARM boards
where they are volunteering their time for obvious reasons including
availability of cheap low power hardware, community interest, and mfg
support.

sun4v is neat.  Nobody is going to really stop you from doing a port to
*BSD or fleshing out Illumos, but I can guarantee you nobody is going to
start working on it because you insulted the competence of other
developers' priority alignment.  OpenBSD supports it fairly well
http://www.openbsd.org/papers/eurobsdcon2011-kettenis.pdf.  OpenBSD also
has low SMP scalability so YMMV but as an intellectual exercise outside of
Solaris that seems fine.

On Sat, Dec 3, 2016 at 3:25 PM, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:

> On 12/03/2016 05:16 PM, Kevin Bowling wrote:
> > If it's as easy as lobbing an insult,
>
>   It's a lot harder than lobbing an insult, of course.  But my insult
> stands.  The sun4u support was done many years ago, but surely with all
> of that OS development in the years following that, it has required SOME
> sort of changes and/or maintenance?  Clearly THAT is happening...for a
> commercially irrelevant architecture.
>
>   I'm sure you see what I mean.
>
> > let's see your sun4v support patches
> > for any OS.
>
>   I run Solaris on my heavy-lifting machines.
>
> > sun4u was done when SPARC was plentiful and somewhat
> > relevant.
>
>   And funded by Sun, if memory serves.  That was apparently the kicker.
>
> > When Oracle acquired Sun, most people saw the writing on the
> > wall immediately.
>
>   Well, they thought they did, as did a whole lot of paranoid
> gloom-and-doom people.  That acquisition was how many years and how many
> SPARC models ago?
>
>               -Dave
>
> --
> Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
> New Kensington, PA
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