[oi-dev] Where should SPARC go?

[Gary Mills]

On Sun, Nov 24, 2019 at 08:40:58PM +0000, Peter Tribble wrote:
>    On Fri, Nov 22, 2019 at 8:43 PM Gary Mills <[1]gary_mills at fastmail.fm>
>    wrote:
> 
>      I have no doubt that SPARC owners are in the minority.  My estimate
>      is
>      about 12 users and 6 developers.
> 
>    That's probably slightly low in terms of users. There are currently
>    about 6 active
>    users of Tribblix for SPARC (other than myself). (For reference, there
>    are 50-100
>    active users of Tribblix on x86.) I suspect the number would increase
>    if illumos on
>    SPARC were more mature.

That's probably true.  It's still a small minority, of course.

>      That's partly because illumos already has SPARC support built in:
>      Peter only fixes things in illumos that are broken.Â
> 
>    It's not as if there's any hardware development going on that affects
>    the
>    supported SPARC platforms. (Yes, it would be nice to support more
>    current
>    hardware, but what we have is a static target.) Much of the cleanup
>    work that
>    I'm (very very slowly) doing is to try and reduce the blast radius of
>    changes
>    from x86.

Yes, I agree with that policy.  Ordinary people have to buy SPARC
machines on the used market.  The largest SPARC machines are too
expensive.  The oldest ones are too slow to be useful.  It's only the
mid-range that we need to support.  Even those are large, heavy, and
power-hungry.

>      Full independance is a good way to cripple SPARC development.  OI
>      source archives, Makefiles, and package manifests are used to build
>      and publish OI SPARC packages, generally with no change.  It's OI
>      all
>      the way.  The only thing that will change is the list of components
>      to
>      build.
> 
>    I wouldn't have expected full independence. I would have thought you
>    want
>    your own fork of oi-userland, though, so you can make whatever local
>    changes
>    necessary.

There won't be any local changes.  At least, that is my intention.

>    One thing I'm finding is that the chance of something
>    building on
>    SPARC is going down over time, so I'm having to hold certain packages
>    on
>    SPARC at older revisions.

So far, I haven't run into that problem with OI.  My intention is to
build OI packages without any changes.  Most of the time, this plan is
successful.


-- 
-Gary Mills-		-refurb-		-Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada-