[OpenIndiana-discuss] So is Solaris officially supported till 2034?

[Alan Coopersmith]

On 09/ 4/17 02:11 PM, Nikola M wrote:
> On 09/ 4/17 08:18 PM, Apostolos Syropoulos wrote:
> I would expect exactly that, to be able to run it on compatible but newer 
> hardware, and at least on Oracle hardware,
> but yes, you are right - over time new hardware requires new support, drivers etc.
> 
> There helps the thing, that same (even binary) drivers work for decades because 
> Solaris driver model was established long time ago and doesn't need to change 
> much. Even today most of drivers are shared between illumos and Oracle Solaris.

While the core Device Driver Interfaces (DDI) don't need to change much, many of
the higher level frameworks, such as the storage & network interfaces, do as the
hardware evolves - interfaces designed for spinning SCSI disks aren't quite the
same as using gobs of NVRAM as storage.   While I'm not surprised you can share
drivers written for Solaris 11.0, I'd be more surprised if drivers written for
the latest hardware & Solaris releases just work out of the box with no effort
on OI/illumos forevermore.

	-alan-