Re: Dropping sparc32 for lenny
Chris Newport wrote:
> You are misinterpreting Sun's position.
> Sun provides hardware and Solaris support for all Sun machines
> until at least 10 years after the last of the type was offered for sale.
> This is one helluva lot longer than most other companies.
I agree, they're far better than much of the competition.
> The MMU miss issues come in 2 varieties, some 400MHz processor
> modules contain iffy cache control chips which were supplied by IBM,
> these modules should have been replaced. In virtually all other cases
> there will be a bug in the kernel code. I am not aware of any current
> bugs so this should not be an issue.
The specific machines where I saw this were (working from memory) 140-240MHz,
and as I wrote up a few weeks ago this was fairly conclusively down to firmware
version. I speculate- and perhaps you would like to correct me on this- that the
firmware initialises areas of the hardware that the kernel subsequently trusts
and leaves alone.
> The real problem with Sparc32 is simple, the maintainer is not doing the
> job and nobody has volunteered to take over. Without an active kernel
> maintainer the port is suffering from bit rot and is doomed.
Which still boils down to the fact that if the architecture was better
understood that it might be easier to find an alternative maintainer.
--
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk
[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]
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