[OpenIndiana-discuss] oracle removes 32bit x86 cpu support for solaris 11 will OI do same?

[Jerry Kemp]

You are absolutely correct.  No one is going to put a 32 bit x86 system
into production.  And no one is going to put an old 280R or V240
UltraSparc III system into production either.

But that's not the point.  Jr. admins and hobbyist pick these boxes up.
 They come from other hobbyist.  They get picked up off eBay.  And they
come from companies that are decommissioning them and give them to
employee's, because it is easier to give them away, vs paying someone to
come pick them up and haul them off.

That is where new growth comes from.  A jr. admin can play with stuff at
home at little to no cost.  And when they are comfortable with an OS at
home, then they are ready and confident to take it to work.
Playing/learning stuff at home is typically fine on older/slower
equipment, but you want to be able to learn on the latest/greatest software.

Sun learned this lesson the hard way with the secret 6 when they
initially refused to release Solaris 9 on the x86 platform.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/70339/_Secret_Six_push_Sun_to_keep_Solaris_on_Intel_?taxonomyId=068

Sun finally figured it out, and released Solaris on the x86 platform
again.  And did very well with Solaris 10 on x86.

I don't think that the "secret six" tactics would work on Oracle.
Oracle will require some other method to re-establish support for newly
unsupported systems.  And I have no idea what that might be.

OpenIndiana may have a great opportunity to establish a foothold, if we
can support, or at least state that OpenIndiana runs on those boxes that
Oracle said no to.  I have a SunBlade 2000 on my desktop at work running
Solaris 11 express.  It has S11Express loaded so I can play with ZFS
encrypted file systems.

If the system runs now, that means that Oracle will physically be
pulling drivers, etc out of the code to ensure that my system will not
run Solaris 11 GA.

I believe that there is a lot of opportunity available for OpenIndiana,
by just not pulling out code that is known to work.

Jerry



On 06/22/11 22:42, Gary Driggs wrote:
> On Jun 22, 2011, at 7:19 PM, Ben Taylor wrote:
> 
>> I can almost see dumping 32-bit x86.
>> but dumping 64-bit US-III/IV?
> 
> Use a kill-a-watt or a smart PDU to compare the power draw for these
> older systems. Do you really want them in production? Solaris 10
> isn't going away if you do. q.v. several BSD & Linux flavors.