[OpenIndiana-discuss] Desktop Painpoints

[Toomas Soome]

> On 5. Feb 2025, at 17:02, Rolf M. Dietze <rmd at orbit.in-berlin.de> wrote:
> 
> 
> [..]
>>> - sparc port of OI (why was sparc removed anyway?)
>> 
>> Because we do not have enough developers, we have no equipment to test with, old SPARC systems are way too slow (20-30 minutes of illumos gate build versus 4-5 or more hours). In short, we should be looking into the future (get ARM64 going) and not into the past. ARM64 systems are very affordable now, SPARC? why one should get rack server in their flat? It is great if there are some people willing to play around with SPARC bits (I myself do like SPARC very much), but …
> 
> so OI is focused only on desktop? Actually solaris based systems are
> as far as I know, the only systems that support generic windows acl
> from the zfs base via nfsv4 to the windows box. I do like to have an OI
> zfs fileserver for windows desktops that supports real acls.
> 

OI is using base OS from illimos-gate, anything on illumos-gate, is therefore available on OI as well.

> And for the sparc systems, there is nothing that stable as sparc
> hardware. and obp on it is far more comfortable as this BIOS stuff.
> one doen't realy have a text console on off the shelf BIOS boxes
> Used sparc T2 boxes are damm cheap to get if one isn't just giving
> them out nothing
> 

And damn slow as well. And while we have some support for T4 (along with some open issues), we can not do much about more recent ones like T5/S7/T8. Of course, you do not really want to hear T8 power on;)


>> 
>> IPD19 to drop SPARC was published 4 years ago. *Perhaps* we can get to actually drop the related code this year. If we are lucky.
> focusing on exactly one architecture is great. And luckily OI was
> never focused on itanium, cause that cpu is gone
> 

No it is not. There are classes of bugs the alternate hw platforms help to discover, especially if it is little versus big endian systems.

But we are where we are. But the point is still the same, if there is a choice, should we invest time and effort on SPARC or ARM64, then (IMO), there is no choice at all.

rgds,
toomas

> /Rolf
> 
> 
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