The problem with illumos on SPARC is; illumos is also removing SPARC support piece by piece, especially as it gets in the way of what they want to do with the OS on x86-64 machines (which is what everyone in that community doing the main development uses). This was due to the lack of having a build machine and the high cost of used hardware.
https://github.com/illumos/ipd/blob/master/ipd/0019/README.md
https://www.illumos.org/issues/15563
Support for SPARC in illumos was removed long ago; the actual cleanup is currently opportunistic.
Only one distro (Tribblix) still supports SPARC and I have no idea if it's using a fork or older version of the illumos kernel. It's also the only illumos distro that people with SPARC systems run because it's the only actively maintained distro for SPARC.
Tribblix is built from the last commit that worked (November 2021), with any relevant changes
since cherry-picked on top. So in terms of timeline Tribblix is contemporary with 11.4, with
hardware support matching the original Solaris 11 release. But we're well into the second decade
since the fork, so there's enough divergence that illumos and Solaris are really different, even
if some of what you see looks very similar.
(And illumos on SPARC uses gcc4 to build the kernel [!], although applications on Tribblix use gcc7.
Given the target market, having the latest and greatest toolchains isn't the highest priority.)
Jake
> On 05/09/2024 2:31 AM EDT John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
>
>
> Hello Rainer,
>
> > Support for Solaris 11.3 had already been obsoleted in GCC 13. However,
> > since the only Solaris system in the cfarm was running 11.3, I've kept
> > it in tree until now when both Solaris 11.4/SPARC and x86 systems have
> > been added.
> >
> > This patch actually removes the Solaris 11.3 support.
>
> I'm not sure I like this change since Solaris 11.3 is the last version of
> Solaris supported by a large number of SPARC systems.
>
> Oracle unfortunately raised the hardware baseline with Solaris 11.4 such
> that every system older than the SPARC T4 is no longer supported by 11.4
> while 11.3 still runs perfectly fine on these machines.
>
> While Oracle does no longer provide feature updates to Solaris 11.3, there
> is still LTSS security support so that users still receive security updates
> so that their systems are continued to be protected against vulnerabilities.
>
> I think Solaris 11.3 support should be kept since the resulting code removal
> is not that large that it would justify dropping support for such a large
> userbase.
>
> Removing Solaris 11.3 support might make sense in the future when SPARC
> support in Illumos has matured enough that people can switch over their
> machines.
>
> Thanks,
> Adrian
>
> --
> .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
> : :' : Debian Developer
> `. `' Physicist
> `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913