[oi-dev] OI project reboot required

[Nikola M.]

On 05/12/13 07:10 PM, Garrett D'Amore wrote:
> On May 12, 2013, at 9:02 AM, Jim Klimov <jimklimov at cos.ru> wrote:
>
>>
>> I believe, 32-bit should be retained. While it is of little utility
>> for ZFS and other huge-RAM jobs, it may be required for some netbooks,
>> older hardware repurposed for tests and SOHO servers, as well as for
>> resource-constrained testing VMs. So I'd vouch for this fork/patch
>> approach if this upstream is still followed.
> We've been doing this for years now.  I'm now starting to think -- 3 years later on -- that this argument feels specious today.  Who runs illumos on a netbook?  I did, once.  Not any more.  (And modern netbooks have 64 bit support!)
>
> Older hardware must be *really* old.  Over 5 years.  For servers, probably over 10 years.  I've thrown away my Pentiums and Pentium IIs.  I suppose there could be some Pentium IIIs and IVs out there, or AMD Athlons (pre-Athlon64), but they'd all be really really slow by today's standards.  Do people run illumos on such kit?  I'm highly doubtful, unless that kit is around just to answer the question of whether 32-bit kernels still work. :-)
Maybe it's called backward compatibility. I think Firefox and
Thunderbird are 32-bit. Isn't the Multiarch what defined Solaris, like
always? I don't want we should loose Solris10 zone if someone needs that
in some moments untill some moment in the future. (There are still
people not migrated from S10)

There is still many older computers that could be useful with Illumos
distro.
Some Oracle decisions are a bit also insane, like removing support for
Floppy disk (why removing when not already used much) and support for
Smart card identification for a Workstation/server.

Openindiana, Illumos have also an advantage of supporting older
hardware, that Oracle removed support for.
We should not forget that market of people using Just FINE servers that
large corporations throw out but could be used for years.
Removing support for still widest-supported architecture on the planet
could be a bit short-sighted in our current market position (not
counting those high-end cloud Illumos consumers, but ordinary people).
If there is some netbook that needs to be used, or older but fine
notebook as a control console, Illumos distro could work on it for
years, since one of the `advantages` of slow development moving of
Illumos could be lower need of changing hardware over years. Or bigger
stability and backward compatibility.

Of course, nothing is set in the stone, it will be how developers want.
If 32-bit needs to be moved to separate place or cut of from newest
advanced be it. But not if it is not necessary.

GDA: Will there ever be "Release" or "Version" of Illumos? Unlike
current rolling-releases?
Will Illumos ABI,API remain stable, like on Solaris?