Re: Bug#965342: openjdk-15: Please update build configuration for sparc64
On 7/20/20 7:38 AM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> On 7/20/20 2:20 AM, Rick Leir wrote:
>> But Hotspot supported the previous version of OpenJDK. Is version 15 Hotspot not supported because
>>
>> changes are known to be needed, or just because the maintainers don't have the time to test it on SPARC?
>
> Native Hotspot support for SPARC was removed by Oracle because they have decided to pull
> out of the SPARC business. As you may have heard, they let go the majority of their
> SPARC engineers in 2018.
When John Fowler left, it was all over. So long as Fowler was with Sun
and then with Oracle there was a chance that big sparc machines were
still going to be shipped. I own a few. Sadly that business is all but
dead and you can not even run the latest Solaris on a sparc server at
all unless you want to buy their top of the line million dollar
machines. Everything else was dropped off a cliff.
It would be very cool to get Debian linux running on a M-4000 beast with
256G of memory but the fences to climb over are very high and then there
are mine fields to crawl into.
It is far far more fun to just go to RISC-V and do good stuff there.
>
> The other OpenJDK developers told me, they could have kept the SPARC port if I had
> volunteered to maintain it (as I'm also a member of OpenJDK upstream). But that
> would have been a lot of work as they are planning to make a lot of intrusive changes
> to OpenJDK in the coming years.
>
>> As you say it is sad. Java and SPARC are the SW/HW claims to fame of the Sun Corp.
> That is now history, unfortunately.
>
So very true and so very sad. I was a big fan of the OpenSolaris
project which at least gave us ZFS and some other items. However
that CDDL license disaster is just a mess. A minefield mess.
--
Dennis Clarke
RISC-V/SPARC/PPC/ARM/CISC
UNIX and Linux spoken
GreyBeard and suspenders optional
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