Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2015 07:29:04 -0800 From: Adrian Chadd <adrian.chadd@gmail.com> To: Michelle Sullivan <michelle@sorbs.net> Cc: Alex McWhirter <alexmcwhirter@triadic.us>, Anna Wilcox <AWilcox@wilcox-tech.com>, freebsd-arch <freebsd-arch@freebsd.org>, sparc64@freebsd.org, Sean Bruno <sbruno@freebsd.org>, Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com>, Marius Strobl <marius@alchemy.franken.de>, Jordan Hubbard <jkh@mail.turbofuzz.com> Subject: Re: Sparc64 doesn't care about you, and you shouldn't care about Sparc64 Message-ID: <CAJ-VmonAhoch8XR%2BJdM%2Bbr5jxvngQdithtgaDAJ4XmgEahreYw@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <56434F34.6040707@sorbs.net> References: <64302b19-9f33-4267-af44-7fc30ea4bf3d@email.android.com> <56434F34.6040707@sorbs.net>
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On 11 November 2015 at 06:22, Michelle Sullivan <michelle@sorbs.net> wrote: > Alex McWhirter wrote: >> The difference between most of the discontinued architectures and SPARC is that Oracle is showing more and more interest in developing their SPARC platform. > > Problem is they are killing it off with the business model. > >> If you consider the arm port, when it comes to alternative operating systems it probably has even a smaller market share than sparc. > > Isn't the Raspberry PI ARM? (mind you FreeBSD would have to try and > catch up to Linux for that one - though it (the platform) is popular.) > > >> I've sat in on my own fair share of Oracle meetings over the past few months, and they are doing everything in their power to push their customers on sparc and Solaris. >> >> > They should consider what worked for Sun and what has killed their > market share off. > > My experience has been in the past that Sun hardware had a massive > following on the secondhand market... Oracle pretty much killed it... > and along with it went the admins. I used to admin as part of teams > datacenters full of Sun boxes, now I don't know where I can even find a > datacenter with a Sun/Oracle box in it - except mine... and all mine are > being depreciated. > > > FreeBSD has an opportunity to fill the void in the secondhand Oracle > (Sun) Hardware market if people want to take it.... but I seriously > don't see why anyone would buy new Oracle boxes and shove FreeBSD on > them - unless their admins already manage FreeBSD on older + Intel hardware. > As always, someone has to write and debug the code. Users are only as good as the revenue to generate to cover development/debugging/deployment costs. So if you're a sparc64 user, how much would you be willing to pay for freebsd/sparc64 support and development? I'm all for keeping an architecture like sparc around, as long as there's active development and active users. MIPS has both. ARM has both. Powerpc has both. Sparc is missing some active developers, but it has plenty of FreeBSD users that speak up (and more users that only speak up privately.) So, if you want to see sparc64 support continue, this requires a grass roots effort to get more development happening - either users need to step up, or someone has to start contributing money. -adrian
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