[OpenIndiana-discuss] is the newly released orac-sol 11 an advance compared to oi?

[Alan Coopersmith]

On 11/10/11 16:42, James Carlson wrote:
> On 11/10/11 17:07, Jerry Kemp wrote:
>> I have Solaris 11 Express still running on my SparcBlade 2000, because, to the
>> best of my knowledge, there are no OI iso images for Sparc.
>>
>> The fact that Solaris 11 Express runs fine on these systems, and Solaris 11 GA
>> does not load tells me that support for these boxes were discontinued for some
>> reason other than technical reasons, i.e. politics, financial, etc.
>
> I think it's pretty unfair to charge the good folks still lingering at
> Oracle in that way.  I was involved with a number of technical reviews
> of support plans at Sun, and I strongly doubt that it's ever as simple
> as calling it just a "business decision."
>
> Often, the reason install has been disabled is that support for some key
> component has become impossible due to a third party license issue.  Or
> the component itself cannot support some key new kernel feature.  Or
> spare parts have run out and it's no longer possible to maintain the
> necessary test infrastructure.

Right - one example was the dropping of 32-bit SPARC CPU support in Solaris 10.
Various features like DTrace that were being added in Solaris 10 could probably
have been made to work with them, but the added complexity, engineering effort
and delay in time to market were decided to not be worth the business value of
trying to make them work on hardware so old that there was little future support
revenue for it, and most enterprise customers with them would likely be doing
a hardware upgrade when it was time to move to Solaris 10 anyway.   Sure that
annoyed people who had a SPARC 20 that they'd saved from the scrap heap and
were running at home, but those people don't pay the developers salaries.

This case is a similar example - some future projects (about which I cannot
give details at this time, sorry) would be much more complex and take much
longer to implement if they also had to support the UltraSPARC II, III, & IV
series CPU's, so the joint technical/business decision was made not to do so,
given that customers with them have many years of Solaris 10 support life left
and when those customers are ready to move to Solaris 11, almost all of those
systems will be past the end of the hardware support life.

(BTW, just in case anyone has forgotten, despite what my e-mail address says,
  all mail messages to forums like this are my own opinion & knowledge, not an
  official Oracle statement, nor is it possible for any Oracle employee to know
  everything happening in this company, so don't go off the deep end if you
  think I'm wrong.)

-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-        alan.coopersmith at oracle.com
	 Oracle Solaris Platform Engineering: X Window System