Debian Drops SPARC Platform Support

jones_supa writes: SPARC isn't exactly a highly-used architecture anymore, so the Debian operating system is dropping support for the platform, according to Joerg Jaspert last week in the "debian-sparc" mailing list. He noted that this does not block a later comeback as "sparc64." Following that announcement, a new post today tells us that SPARC support was just removed from the unstable, experimental and jessie-updates channels.

Comments

Sad Day

[OverlordQ]

I think the first version of Debian I'd ever used was Hamm on an old Sparcstation IPC.

Re:Sad Day

[Anonymous Coward]

have you sorted your retirement out?

Re:Sad Day

[benjfowler]

When I was in college and was completely skint, I picked up a Sparc IPC with a horrid 8-bit CG3 framebuffer for a song, and that got me through two years of college.

Debian hamm sucked quite a bit less than SunOS, apart from the terrible quality of the CG3 driver in Xfree, which would lock the entire machine up solid after about 30 minutes of use... sure-as-shit haven't missed that...

Re:Sad Day

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm, interesting. AFAIR, Hamm only supported i386 and m68k. The next two architectures, sparc and alpha were added in Slink.

Re:Sad Day

[OverlordQ]

Then it was slink. It's been 16 years, details can get a bit fuzzy.

Re:Sad Day

[Anonymous Coward]

Hamm? What was that like Debian 2.0? fucking n00b

(not joking; too many young idiots these days)

Re:Sad Day

[TheRaven64]

Debian hamm sucked quite a bit less than SunOS

We had a couple of those. You should have tried NetBSD. For a very long time, Linux had particularly bad handling of the SPARC TLB and NetBSD was faster to the extent that it was noticeable by the user in the GUI.

apart from the terrible quality of the CG3 driver in Xfree, which would lock the entire machine up solid after about 30 minutes of use

When was these? Even after they stopped being useful as stand-alone machines, we used them as dumb X servers and easily had a few weeks of XFree86 uptime.

ran debian on sparc for over 10 years

[AndroSyn]

I had a Sun Netra T1 200 for a bit over 10 years that ran Debian on Sparc. The hardware was reliable, the Debian as an OS worked well enough, less of a headache than Solaris IMHO. Occasionally had some weird kernel related quirks, but I generally just kept it tracking Debian sid.

    I think it was just a matter of time that the Debian sparc port went away, the surplus of old sparc boxes has gone away more than anything. I'm not sure anyone used Debian on sparc for anything serious(read business use), though.

Re:ran debian on sparc for over 10 years

[Lumpy]

Used it in comcast to make close to $1,000,000 a day gathering data from the old ad insertion boxes.

Solaris was a major PITA to deal with so I installed debian and simply rewrote the data harvester in C and it ran that way for 11 years. 4 of which were without any maintenance at all as I had left the company. and 4 years later I started getting notifications of script failures to a private email address I had that interfaced with my MSN watch. (Yes that long ago)

The funny part is someone recently fired that box back up as last month I had an email that it successfully rebooted and started the cron job but could not find the servers it was trying to harvest data from.

Re:ran debian on sparc for over 10 years

[Anonymous Coward]

Used it in comcast to make close to $1,000,000 a day gathering data from the old ad insertion boxes.

So, it ran all day for 11 years and it made $4 Billion. Congratulations.

Re:ran debian on sparc for over 10 years

[phantomfive]

I'm not sure anyone used Debian on sparc for anything serious(read business use), though.

Let's be honest......the day the value of open source software is determined by its "business use," is the day the open source community is dead.

Re:ran debian on sparc for over 10 years

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand the "Solaris was a major PITA to deal with" comment If anything the unstable, as in hard, power-off kind of dailycrash, nature of every kind of linux I've ever had to deal with make Solaris look like nirvana. If you learned BSD-Unix or SYSV-Unix then Solaris works out of the box no fuss no bother. If you grew up on linux, where NFS kinda-sorta works, configuration files that are in different place and work different every release every flavor. I'd love to move my 256 node cluster off linix and back on to Solaris so I would have to keep rebooting node all the time, but I management says linux

Re:ran debian on sparc for over 10 years

[Anonymous Coward]

How about you tell that to Google and a myriad of other big ass companies utilizing (and contributing back to!) open source and recognizing its value BECAUSE it's used by businesses. If it weren't, then it'd be nothing more than amateur crap done in spare time.

Re:ran debian on sparc for over 10 years

[TheRaven64]

Someone needs to develop the software. The difference between open source and proprietary software is that open source software is developed by and for people who want to use it, proprietary software is developed by people who want to sell it. Successful projects are ones where the people who want to use it want to use it enough to fund development.

Re:ran debian on sparc for over 10 years

[phantomfive]

Successful projects are ones where the people who want to use it want to use it enough to fund development.

I'm going to call you a moron right here because you only think of success in terms of monetary value and popularity. Success is not measured by money alone.

A successful project is one that produces great code, one that makes its creator happy.

How soon until x86 is dropped?

[Anonymous Coward]

I keep hearing ARM is superior and the future (a few years ago it was Cell - WTF happened there?) - so dropping x86 support can't be too far away...

Re:How soon until x86 is dropped?

[Guspaz]

While Cell failed as a platform, the concept itself had merit, and the concept of pairing high-performance and low-performance processors can be found in the HPC market today (like Intel's Phi or GPGPU) and in the mobile market (like ARM's big.LITTLE architecture).

Re:How soon until x86 is dropped?

[TWX]

Ah, but there's still a lot of old 32-bit x86 stuff out there, so the barrier to entry is extremely low. We still have 32-bit machines in-production, albeit they're the oldest ones still being used, but there are probably several thousand still running.

Dropping Sparc unfortunately makes sense. Hardware was already exotic and somewhat uncommon when it was new and still supported, and is now even more rare and given its proprietary nature, more likely to simply be permanently removed if it breaks. It's also no entry-level friendly; a kid wanting to play with Linux 'just to see' can go to the Goodwill and buy an old x86 box for $20 and friends can help make things work.

Re: How soon until x86 is dropped?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't hold your breath on that one. There's still x86 machines running everywhere.

Re:How soon until x86 is dropped?

[squiggleslash]

I'm not sure I've heard anyone suggest ARM is superior. It happens to be fulfilling a good niche as an architecture that provides decent performance per watt. But you're not seeing anyone wanting to use it in areas where power isn't a concern.

I suspect ARM will eventually be the architecture that's supplanted, not ix86 or ix86-64. Intel's getting good at producing low power ix86 family CPUs - I have one in my tablet, and the mobile space isn't really wedded to any architecture, but the desktop space is.

Re:How soon until x86 is dropped?

[phantomfive]

(a few years ago it was Cell - WTF happened there?)

In brief, compilers didn't do a good job automatically optimizing for the vector units, and it was not worth it for most people to do it manually. A few scientific groups experimented with it, but I think most of them have gone to GPUs or just plain old supercomputers.

Re:How soon until x86 is dropped?

[Grishnakh]

Sounds like a missed opportunity for open-source: the hardware companies making Cell should have invested in compiler engineers to make really good compilers for It (or just add onto gcc), and open-source all the work. Then lots of people would have wanted to use Cell processors because of the performance.

Making a nice product, and then making closed, proprietary tools that are needed to best use that product, isn't a winning business strategy. Give away the tools free so people are interested in trying out and using your product, and then it gets designed into high-volume parts.

Re:How soon until x86 is dropped?

[Anonymous Coward]

>a kid wanting to play with Linux 'just to see' can go to the Goodwill and buy an old x86 box for $20 and friends can help make things work

I think those days are gone, Goodwill started being greedy bastards and puts all the major computer type shit on eBay. I think its more like a kid will go and download VirtualBox and start a Linux VM on the computer they already own.

I do recall myself being super excited for any non-x86 type machine (pa-risc, sparc, R10000) back in the day, I am kind of sad to see it go to the history books.

Re:How soon until x86 is dropped?

[TWX]

There's a Goodwill next to one of the hardware stores that I shop at regularly, so I'm in there fairly often. There's always lots of otherwise-obsolete computer stuff in there. Never had a problem finding something useful.

Re:How soon until x86 is dropped?

[jbolden]

I'd take that bet. Don't forget how much faster the ARM chips are. For example the A7 is twice the speed of the A6 which is almost 3x the speed of the A5. Admittedly the A8 is only a 20% speed burst but that's not bad relative to x86 especially for an off year. We'll find out over the next decade plus: can you make ARM faster more easily than you can x86 more efficient? But I'd bet on ARM.

Re:How soon until x86 is dropped?

[Dutch Gun]

Videogame programmer here. It wasn't really a compiler optimization issue. There's no compiler on the planet that can perform high-level optimizations like that.

The real problem was that those vector units (SPEs) were highly specialized computational devices, best suited for churning through relatively simple, parallel tasks with a high volume of sequential data (e.g. media streams). Videogames, unfortunately, are loaded with tasks that require access to complex data sets and/or require lots of context switches, neither of which the SPEs can handle well. Ultimately, the SPEs, while powerful in specialized roles, often had problems compensating for the slightly less powerful CPU or graphics hardware, despite requiring many times the work to optimize the game for that hardware, and all that just to get similar performance to the Xbox 360's more general-purpose hardware.

In short, the Cell processor was immensely powerful for its time in highly specialized situations, but it wasn't very well suited to the typical tasks and loads seen in a videogame. It was an idea that sounds great in theory, but didn't work so well in actual practice.

Re:How soon until x86 is dropped?

[Anonymous Coward]

a very long time. there are still modern x86 boxes being made especially in the embedded products, plus anything that is limited to =2GB RAM most likely shouldn't be x86-64 because it just wasts RAM and storage space.

Re:How soon until x86 is dropped?

[Cramer]

Sparc includes "sparc64", for which there is a shitton of hardware still out there. That people actively use. Removing "sparc32" I could understand, but all of SPARC?!? Yet mips, powerpc, and s390 are still there.

Re:How soon until x86 is dropped?

[TheRaven64]

MIPS and PowerPC are still huge in embedded. MIPS is used on a huge number of cheap routers and a lot of these are in dire need of a better OS than they ship with (and many of them ship with a hacked-up Linux). PowerPC is mostly big in automotive, but IBM still sells machines and is willing to keep funding a lot of the software support. The same goes for S/390: a big part of IBM's sales pitch there is that you can spin up Linux VMs on it easily and run the OS that you're used to. SPARC these days basically means Oracle appliances. You don't buy a SPARC machine if you want to run Linux, you buy one if you want to do the vertical integration thing with Oracle (i.e. Oracle arranges you vertically with your head downwards and shakes until all of the money is integrated with their wallet).

Re:How soon until x86 is dropped?

[TheRaven64]

I think you have some of those the wrong way around: The A7 is about 20% faster than the A8 (it's an A8 that's had the decoder replaced with one that's compatible with the A15 and been left with the engineering group with the most OCD to optimise for a year or so).

Re:How soon until x86 is dropped?

[Eunuchswear]

Sounds like a missed opportunity for open-source

If you remember the manufacturers of the most widely available machine with Cell kicked open source in the teeth. When Sony stopped the PS3 running Linux where was the incentive to develop open source software for the Cell?

Re:How soon until x86 is dropped?

[TheRaven64]

Videogame programmer here. It wasn't really a compiler optimization issue. There's no compiler on the planet that can perform high-level optimizations like that.

Compiler engineer here. The vectorisation for the Cell wasn't the hard part, it was the data management. Autovectorisation and even autoparallelisation are done by some compilers (the Sun compiler suite was doing both before the Cell was introduced), and can be aided by OpenMP or similar annotations. If the Cell SPUs had been cache-coherent and had direct access to DRAM, then there's a good chance that a bit of investment in the compiler would have given a big speedup. The problem of deciding when to DMA data to and from the SPUs and where you need to add explicit synchronisation into the PPU was much, much harder. I've worked on a related problem in the context of automatic offload to GPUs and it turns out to be non-computable in most nontrivial cases (it depends heavily on accurate alias analysis).

Re:How soon until x86 is dropped?

[Cramer]

Don't even try the "embedded market" BS. Debian is incredibly bad for anything "small". How big is a pure "base" install again? A fuckload more than 99% of embedded devices have.

The entire logic (read: Debian Political BS) behind what arch's are supported is (a) popularity, and (b) having a pool of active maintainers. SPARC has neither of those. The entire backstory is over a year long and boiled down to some nut screwing up the gcc packaging -- changed only for SPARC, that broke only SPARC. (I smell a rat.) Ultimately, it probably needed to go. Just like for the PC -- where amd64 took multiple eons for the fools to finally support -- many eons have passed without a migration to a full 64bit distro. The build system still, to this day (22 years on), builds everything as 32bit. Yes, there's a 64bit kernel, there are 64bit libraries, and gcc can output a working full sparcv9 64bit executable, yet, they still spit out a 32bit userland.

(One would hope this lights a fire under the sparc64 ports project.)

Re:How soon until x86 is dropped?

[virtual_mps]

Have you been watching Intel's product releases? Intel decided a couple of years ago that they weren't going to let ARM have the low-power server market and completely retooled their product line, starting with the avoton server line (C2xxx) and following up with the D-15xx family. (Remember how AMD keeps talking about interest from data centers? D-1540 retail availability has been tight for months because some major datacenter providers have bought essentially *all* of them...) Watching how fast Intel was able to change course and deliver products that beat the ARM *roadmap* in that timeframe (let alone delivered products) made me abandon hopes that ARM might have a serious presence in the server market. Intel just has too much R&D money & process tech for any existing competitor to go toe-to-toe with them in a segment they decide to invest in.

Re:How soon until x86 is dropped?

[jbolden]

I haven't been following it. The D-1540 seems like a nice offering. Smartphones are now 1/2 of the entire consumer electronics industry. I wouldn't underestimate the money going into ARM.

As far as ARM in server where I think ARM is likely to expand to first would be laptop. HP Chromebook 11 for example already uses this processor. Then it moves up market taking over some mainstream laptops. I could easily see for by end of decade for Apple's laptop lineup:
ARM for Macbook (OSX or a variant of iOS)
Intel for Macbook Pro (OSX)

Apple's the bulk of all profits.

Re:How soon until x86 is dropped?

[jbolden]

I was just using published benchmarks. What I've heard is that 20nm helped a bit, the GPU helped a lot. I hadn't heard anything about a decoder problem. So I meant what I wrote but I'm willing to be educated.

Re:How soon until x86 is dropped?

[virtual_mps]

Yes, ARM is used in a lot of phones. A phone chip is very different than a server chip. The question is whether any ARM vendor has the money to do *general purpose server* R&D in competition with intel. So far, everyone who has tried has either crashed & burned or provided fairly disappointing results. What they have going for them is power efficiency, which matters in embedded solutions (think raspberry pi & smaller) but isn't that compelling on full size laptops, desktops, or servers--saving a few watts over an intel solution doesn't matter when the screen, memory, and communications consume more power than the CPU. (Side note--intel has a material advantage here by integrating some of the power-hungry components like 10GBE on silicon that's one or two generations ahead in terms of process compared to the ARM competition.) ARM seems firmly in the region of diminishing returns--they can't consume less than 0, so there just isn't that much more to cut. Intel has room to improve, and with the money they can throw at things, they will--to the extent that makes sense. In most applications single thread performance is still more relevant than a very high number of cores. So intel's current strategy is to be reasonably power efficient, integrate components in a compelling fashion, but not sacrifice too much single thread performance. So with D-1540 you get integrated 10GBE, integrated SATA, integrated DDR4, & 8 fairly powerful cores. The ARM vision is to deliver 48 slower cores, for a total package that's a little more power efficient and roughly on-par performance-wise for embarassingly parallel applications (of which there are few). Given how many distinct architectures intel has delivered over the past few years, I'm pretty confident that, if high-scaling applications actually materialize, intel will be able to crank out a new SKU faster than any ARM vendor will be able to explit the niche, bascially by scaling up avoton. (The successor to that architecture, denverton, is due out at the end of this year, probably with 16 cores & integrated 10GBE on a 14nm process.)

Re:How soon until x86 is dropped?

[jbolden]

I'm thinking of ARM as a classic disruptive technology: https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

i) ARM comes in first and takes customers who have requirements that x86 couldn't possibly satisfy: done
ii) ARM takes those customers who could be on x86 but gain tremendously from ARM: done
iii) ARM takes the least profitable least demanding customers from x86: happening with Chrome books -- in progress
iv) ARM takes over people core to x86 (laptops): not happening yet
v) ARM takes over more demanding users x86 desktop, server... : not close
-- this results in x86 becoming a niche product for the most demanding users
vi) ARM takes over the most demanding users extincting x86: not close

I'm saying I can see step iii becoming step iv. Of course ARM this year is not ready for step (v). But that's different than what the situation might look like 10 or 15 years out. If neither Windows nor Linux were tuned for x86 as the primary platform its dominance in server would be in more danger. If ARM vendors were moving $100b+ / yr in CPUs (double Intel's entire revenue) the server would be in more danger....

Re:How soon until x86 is dropped?

[TheRaven64]

There's no problem with the decoder. The A8 is an older chip. The A7 is an updated version of the A8 (smaller, more power efficient due to various tweaks and extended to support a newer version of the instruction set so that it can be used in big.LITTLE configurations with the A15. Oh, and with SMP support, which the A8 lacked, though the A9 had). The A8 is not faster than the A7.

Re:How soon until x86 is dropped?

[virtual_mps]

But the main reason they can sell anything in step iii is that intel doesn't care about those customers. It's not clear that ARM vendors are actually making much money on those products, and if intel cut its profit margin (i.e., if they cared enough about that particular market to actually go after it) then the ARM products would be economically untenable. There simply isn't a fundamental advantage there for the ARM vendors to take advantage of: their advantage is cost, and that's because intel has *decided* not to lower prices that much. Again, ARM's marginal power advantage simply doesn't matter on a typical laptop because the CPU isn't the most power-hungry part. (Unless you're crunching numbers, but then you probably want to have a faster chip even if it uses more power.) Even on phones the advantage of ARM is less about power consumption than the fact that you can configure an ARM SOC any way you want it--while intel has basically no interest in licensing its most advanced IP so that OEMs can build custom SOCs. The limitations of that strategy are clear--ARM hardware is basically disposable once the initial OS becomes obsolete, because nobody cares about engineering updates for old products--and I just don't see custom SOC being a driver for laptops/desktops/servers. Those markets demand more standardized hardware, and that brings us back to ARM competing toe-to-toe with intel. For the niches where hardware coprocessors really matter, intel has phi for HPC and quickassist for crypto/compression/DSP/etc.

Re:How soon until x86 is dropped?

[Shirley Marquez]

Around here you can find old x86 boxes for free on Craigslist. CRT monitors are also plentiful; flat panels occasionally show up.

Re:How soon until x86 is dropped?

[jbolden]

Of course if the dominant player cut their margins they can preserve their position with their least profitable, least demanding customer. That's always the case with disruption from below. Microsoft did precisely that with netbooks almost a decade ago where they allowed netbooks to:

a) drive down the price of OEM Windows
b) not allow them to raise the specs for years and thus made the XP -> Vista upgrade less advantageous while often equally painful.
c) by forcing Microsoft to focus down market created a bigger opening for Apple at the top of the market. ....

Absolutely if Intel choose to go after the ARM business they could. But Intel just turned Apple down on a fabrication deal. Intel wants their margins more than they want marketshare. Intel's least demand, lowest margin customers are ARM's high margin most demanding customers. That's how ARM slowly moves upmarket. That's how disruption from below works.

As for SOC for laptops. Here we disagree. The x86 market today has standardized hardware. Intel, Microsoft and Western Digital created a hardware / software standard that's lasted for a generation. But that hardware / software standard doesn't need to hold, and obviously wouldn't be holding if x86 is being replaced. I can easily imagine a future generation of SOC for systems with keyboards as much as they are useful in today's tablets. That doesn't mean today's SOCs are good enough, today's SOCs are barely good enough for Chromebooks. We know that the bottom rungs of laptop users were able to replace some or most of their usage with the current generation of iOS/Android tablets, if we picture SOCs 3x as functional...

Re:How soon until x86 is dropped?

[virtual_mps]

" Intel's least demand, lowest margin customers are ARM's high margin most demanding customers"

This is where I think you're wrong. The phones & the tablets are where the money is, the chromebooks are an uninteresting sideshow for the ARM vendors just as much as for Intel. There's no way they're making the same money on $200 netbooks as they are on $700 phones. They're also not putting any R&D into that segment, it just happens to move along with cobbled-together parts. It's not a path to anything.

"I can easily imagine a future generation of SOC for systems with keyboards as much as they are useful in today's tablets."

You seem to misunderstand. Of course systems are getting more integrated--the question is whether consumers are interested in buying a server whose hardware is completely different than the server they bought six months ago, which needs completely different core drivers, can't boot the same kernel, etc. It's not in the consumer's interest to have that degree of vendor customization in the desktop and server markets. I already pointed out that Intel actually derives a competitive advantage from standardized SOCs: their competitors have to be better engineered just to overcome intel's process advtantage. E.g., you need to have a singificantly better 28nm 10GBE implementation to be more power efficient than intel's 14nm implementation. Is that likely? Can the ARM server vendor outperform intel's CPU, and outperform intel's best in class networking, and outperform intel's fairly solid storage controllers, and outperform intel's pcie controllers, and outperform intel's memory controllers, etc.? That's a lot of R&D, and none of the competitors have that kind of head count.

Don't get me wrong--I'd love to see ARM as a strong competition to intel in the server space. But watching how fast intel has pivoted, how quickly and reliably they deliver on new tech, and how slow and underwhelming the ARM vendors have been, I just don't see it as likely.

Re:How soon until x86 is dropped?

[jbolden]

Server I think is trickier. Let me throw out a hypothetical for say 2028.

Samsung releases a 1024 core SOC which is cool enough it can be used in a blade. Intel is using 16 core Xeons that require a full 1U. The Samsung cores are say each 1/2 as fast as the Intel cores. Everything needs to be custom compiled for the hardware but Samsung has their own fully supported distribution which supports cloud foundry, open stack... The complexity of the x86 makes Intel emulating these designs impossible.

Now that I think could do it.

Re:How soon until x86 is dropped?

[virtual_mps]

Sure, if we imagine that vendor X comes up with something implausibly advanced (scaling software to 1024 cores is hard, which is why single thread performance still matters), and intel actually goes backwards (you can buy a 32 core intel blade today) instead of developing new tech, then sure, vendor X can win.

Though nobody would buy it if it were tied to a single-vendor version of linux. BTDT, it sucks.

Re:How soon until x86 is dropped?

[Dutch Gun]

Yep, I agree. It's all about the data access, as I mentioned. When I said "there's no compiler on the planet" etc, I was talking about high-level optimizations, which tends to involve a lot of code and data restructuring at a fundamental level. It's a much simpler task by comparison to auto-parallelize/auto-vectorize loops, etc.

If the Cell SPUs had been cache-coherent and had direct access to DRAM

But that's a pretty big "if" there, as the SPUs didn't perform well under circumstances in which compiler-level micro-optimizations would normally work, as the overhead of the DMA transfers / context switches would tend to cancel out any potential gains. The reality for PS3 developers was that everything had to be excruciatingly hand-optimized for the peculiarities of that architecture.

Now, the relative similarity and simplicity of the PS4/Xbone are a blessing in comparison, because optimizations tend to work equally well on both platforms.

Re:How soon until x86 is dropped?

[TheRaven64]

But that's a pretty big "if" there

Oh, I agree - you'd have added a lot of hardware complexity and probably more than you'd be able to fit if you wanted to keep 7 of them in the thermal envelope of the Cell.

Re:How soon until x86 is dropped?

[jbolden]

OK adjust to 2048 vs 128. The point was that you are saying as long as x86 is a far better fit for servers it will be used for servers. Well of course. The question is what happens as the ARM economy gets larger than the x86 economy and the advantages of ARM design techniques come to dominate. Obviously I can't see what's likely many years in the future so I don't know what that will look like. For laptop it is obvious that SOC / power drive the change. Lighter and thinner. Beyond that is gets opaque.

However the economics are daunting. With ARM selling 10-20x or more as many chips per year...

Re:How soon until x86 is dropped?

[virtual_mps]

They're selling more chips for less profit--Intel still has them trounced in terms of the R&D budget regardless of how many units they ship. All you have as an argument is "ARM is better so eventually it will actually be better", but the instruction set frankly just doesn't matter very much.

Note that Intel is a fairly large ARM vendor, and had other RISC products in the past. They still design & build such chips for embedded controllers, so it's not like they don't know how to do it, but if they thought that was the best path forward for general purpose CPUs they probably wouldn't have sold that tech off to Marvell.

Re:How soon until x86 is dropped?

[Blaskowicz]

How about this : the 2048 core ARM server appears as a collection of 256 8-core systems that appear virtually independent (such systems already exist : 16 core ARM that's a collection of four quad core on one die, with massive on-chip buses and on-die I/O and goodies but otherwise it's four CPU that are shared-nothing between them)

The Intel system appears as a single machine with 128 cores.
Intel wins, mostly.

Re:How soon until x86 is dropped?

[toddestan]

Actually, what happened is that Dell partnered with Goodwill to recycle any old computer that was donated to the store. While this isn't all bad, as I'm sure that Goodwill gets a fair amount of stuff that's basically junk, it also means that any newer/good hardware that gets donated also ends up getting scrapped. So the end result is that Dell has managed to eliminate one source of inexpensive used computers out there.

Though your best bet would be to just ask around, check craigslist, or keep an eye on some local dumpsters. I'm sure you could find an old P4 or even some early 64-bit hardware for free without too much trouble.

Mod reversal

[jenningsthecat]

Posting to cancel a 'Troll' mod that I posted to the wrong comment by mistake. And may the AC who posted shit about gay black people, die very slowly in a fire

.

Re:Mod reversal

[OverlordQ]

It's GNAA, arguably been trolling Slashdot as long as SPARC has been around.

Re:Mod reversal

[wbr1]

No.. let him be stuck in a black pride party eternity..

Re:Mod reversal

[Neo-Rio-101]

Speaking of which... where is the "You COWS!" guy in the comments for this article? No silly comment about SPARC being for cows?
He's getting slow.....

A Shame

[snkline]

I sorta liked SPARC. My assembly language class in college covered MIPS and SPARC programming, and while MIPS was simpler, the SPARC ISA was much more interesting.

Re:A Shame

[Anonymous Coward]

For an interesting architecture, try the Mill. It is so strikingly brilliant, that it is hard to retain any interest at all in conventional architectures. It also puts the RISC/x86 conflict into perspective; they are essentially identical at the core, and share many of the same problems. Peeling away legacy cruft is always welcome, but the Mill offers so much more...

Re:A Shame

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, ARM kind of kicked the shit out of everything in the low end.

Re:A Shame

[Anonymous Coward]

I took a quick peek, and believe me that crap isn't going anywhere.

Re:A Shame

[Eunuchswear]

It sounds hilarious. A machine designed to prevent people writing assembly code, designed by someone who worked on Algol68 and Ada.

Re:A Shame

[Anonymous Coward]

I just listened to the talk and 1) it contains a lot of glaring errors and 2) the guy never explains how the architectural changes actually help. I felt like I was listening to a snake oil salesman.

Re:A Shame

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds hilarious.

It is. These people can't provide a PDF, only a PowerPoint slideshow because "the animations are essential".

I don't know what they said after that because I got that far and promptly closed the tab.

SPARC isn't exactly a highly-used architecture

[nimbius]

my SparcCLASSIC works just fine for slashdot and arpanet mail, you insensitive CLOD!

Re:SPARC isn't exactly a highly-used architecture

[ZorinLynx]

My gods. Dude, those things were slow on the very day they CAME OUT.

I don't know why Sun even made the SparcClassic. They were absolute garbage, then you look at how expensive they were and it's even more mind blowing.

Re:SPARC isn't exactly a highly-used architecture

[squiggleslash]

They were, to be fair, rock solid. I was using a couple until the late 2000s as my DSL gateway and email servers, and it was largely the lack of support (from the rest of the world) for SCSI-2 that made me reluctantly shut them down for the last time.

Re:SPARC isn't exactly a highly-used architecture

[Christian Smith]

My gods. Dude, those things were slow on the very day they CAME OUT.

I don't know why Sun even made the SparcClassic. They were absolute garbage, then you look at how expensive they were and it's even more mind blowing.

It was the low cost SPARCstation LX, which itself was not a screamer, but fast enough.

You have to remember the PCs of the time were mostly i386. This was pre-Pentium, and i486s were still very expensive. All PCs were ISA bus (16-bit at perhaps 20MHz) versus the 32-bit 25MHz SBUS serving the SPARCstations of the time, and it can be seen that anything beyond the CPU was much faster on any SPARCstation. And even CPU wise, SPARC had the legs of even the highest end i486s of the time, especially on FPU performance (though a well cached 486 would probably edge it in integer benchmarks.)

The real SUN competition of the time were HP and the MIPS based vendors, both of whom pummeled SPARC CPU wise, but lagged in areas such as standards and vendor lock in.

TL;DR
If you were doing typical workstation type stuff of the 90's (modeling, simulation, anything FPU intensive) a SPARCstation really was cost effective against the actual competition (MIPS, HP.) Intel workstations just weren't in the game at this time.

Wow, end of an era.

[aussersterne]

For more than just a couple of us here, I suspect, there was a time when "Sparc," "UNIX," "graphics," "Internet," and "science" were all nearly synonymous terms.

Simpler times. Boy did that hardware last and last and last in comparison to the hardware of today.

Well, I suppose it can finally no longer be said that the Sparcstation 10 I keep here just for old times' sake can still run "current Linux distributions." But it's still fun to pull it out for people, show them hundreds of megabytes of RAM, 1152x900 24-bit graphics, gigabytes of storage, multiple ethernet channels, and multiple processors, running Firefox happily, and tell them it dates to 1992, when high-end PCs were shipping with mayyybe 16-32GB RAM, a single 486 processor, 640x480x16 graphics, a few dozen megabytes of storage, and no networking.

It helps people to get a handle on how it was possible to develop the internet and do so much of the science that came out of that period—and why even though I don't know every latest hot language, the late '80s/early '90s computer science program that I went to (entirely UNIX-based, all homework done using the CLI, vi, and gcc, emphasis on theory, classic data structures, and variously networked/parallelized environments, with labs of Sparc and 88k hardware all on a massive campus network) seems to have prepared me for today's real-world needs better than the programs they went to, with lots of Dell boxes running Windows-based Java IDEs.

Re:Wow, end of an era.

[ZorinLynx]

What's amazing is how RELIABLE those things were.

We have a couple of SparcStation 5 units STILL RUNNING because a professor refuses to let them go. They have 2GB hard drives (yes TWO gigs) and 128MB of RAM. These things were outrageously expensive when they came out; I'm guessing Sun spent a lot of the extra money on overengineering the hell out of everything.

"Sir this version of Solaris is no longer supported. We can't keep running it unless we block access to it from the Internet."
"It doesn't need Internet access, just block it and let me keep using it."

"Sir this machine is older than some of your students. If it dies we cannot replace any parts."
"No problem just leave it up."

"Sir..."
"Just leave it."

Ahh, academia. :)

Re:Wow, end of an era.

[fahrbot-bot]

For more than just a couple of us here, I suspect, there was a time when "Sparc," "UNIX," "graphics," "Internet," and "science" were all nearly synonymous terms.

Remember the old Sun slogan: The network is the computer.

[ Yes, I'm that old. ]

Re:Wow, end of an era.

[WarlockD]

I was just thinking about SPARC the other day. My old boss runs this electronics junk shop. He is closing down this month forever but I saw him in the back, taking apart old Sparc 10's and Ultras and pulling out the addon cards to try to sell off eBay. Sad really. He should of done that 10 years ago when they were worth much more:P

Re:Wow, end of an era.

[Anonymous Coward]

... it dates to 1992, when high-end PCs were shipping with mayyybe 16-32GB RAM ...

?!?!?

Hope you meant MB...

Re:Wow, end of an era.

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh you forgot how to think in terms of MB.

PC's came with 16-32MB, not GB, in 1992.

Re:Wow, end of an era.

[__aaclcg7560]

For more than just a couple of us here, I suspect, there was a time when "Sparc," "UNIX," "graphics," "Internet," and "science" were all nearly synonymous terms.

I did a six-month internship at a Fortune 500 company in 1997 where every programmer had a SPARC workstation and a row of UNIX binders on a shelf above their desk. No one actually used the binders for anything, as they were just office decorations like the plastic plants. You couldn't be a SERIOUS ENGINEER without a row of SERIOUS BINDERS above your desk.

Re:Wow, end of an era.

[__aaclcg7560]

As my college instructor told me back in 1992, a 32-bit processor has a 4GB memory limit and 4GB is all the memory you will ever need in your lifetime. Actually, to a certain extent, he wasn't far off. All the computers I use at home and work today only have 4GB installed.

Re:Wow, end of an era.

[Melkhior]

And the SS10 didn't have the ZX framebuffer of the SS20 - 24 bits accelerated graphics. 2nd one available as an option. That was an awesome machine, still one of the greatest computer design ever.

I started using UNIX with SunOS 4.1.4 on SPARCstation 1+. Still have my SS2 somewhere in the attic. Still have my Ultra 1 Creator. Can't throw them away.

I like the speed of my W3680 - but it's just not the same.

Guess I'm old :-(

Re: Wow, end of an era.

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt such an old box would ever get hacked. It's not like modern rootkits have exploits from the 1990s built-in. Unless somebody was intentionally targeting that box, it'd be like the most secure OS ever.

Re:Wow, end of an era.

[DeVilla]

...and tell them it dates to 1992, when high-end PCs were shipping with mayyybe 16-32GB RAM, a single 486 processor, 640x480x16 graphics, a few dozen megabytes of storage, and no networking.

I know I wasn't buying high end at the time, but I didn't think I was I slumming it that much.

Re:Wow, end of an era.

[dougmc]

and tell them it dates to 1992, when high-end PCs were shipping with mayyybe 16-32GB RAM, a single 486 processor, 640x480x16 graphics, a few dozen megabytes of storage, and no networking.

As much as I loved Sun hardware at that time (though I didn't get to touch anything better than a Sparcstation 2 until years later), since you explicitly mention high-end PCs, I'll have to point out that that 1992 hi-end consumer PCs (you did say high end, so I can pick the best of what's available) did have not just networking but ethernet (it was relatively common, and not just found on high end machines), could have 1024x768 with 16 or 24 bit (not color) graphics, perhaps 32 MB of memory (though that is on the high end for 1992. I wonder if you could actually get 512 MB into a SS10 in 1992 -- were chips of sufficient density available yet?), and could run all the exact same hard drives that your Sparcserver 10 did -- just get a SCSI card.

I also remember dual cpu PCs being available in 1992, though of course they were very high end and expensive.

Of course, a typical new but *low end* PC at that time had a 386SX, 1 MB of memory, a 640x480 VGA monitor ...

Re: Wow, end of an era.

[guruevi]

There possibly IS a host of other problems besides the kernel. We still ran(run) OpenSSL/OpenSSH and Apache on those boxes so the automatic exploits that run against them may be numerous however they are typically very well sandboxed (better than some current *NIX'es) so although you won't get access to any data, they make for a great bot.

I actually have two different-era SPARC we are still supporting (the latest I believe runs Solaris 5, the first one still has an early IBM Token Ring card bridged by a very dusty device to Ethernet).

Re:Wow, end of an era.

[elfprince13]

Huh. It's been 4 years since I used a machine with that little RAM on a daily basis. These days 16GB is workable, but I still saturate it a couple times a week. All depends on workflow, I suppose.

Re:Wow, end of an era.

[h4ck7h3p14n37]

Well, I suppose it can finally no longer be said that the Sparcstation 10 I keep here just for old times' sake can still run "current Linux distributions."

NetBSD and OpenBSD both run on the SparcStation 10 and they're actual UNIX operating system. http://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/s... http://www.openbsd.org/sparc.h...

Re:Wow, end of an era.

[dougmc]

A 32 bit cpu can address 4 GB directly, but that doesn't mean it has a 4 GB memory limit.

For example, in 1995 Intel added PAE to their 32 bit Pentium Pro cpus, allowing them to access more than 4 GB of memory.

Hell, my Apple IIe had 128KB of memory, in spite of the 8 bit cpu with the 16 bit address space only being able to access 64KB of memory, through similar tricks.

And yes, 4 GB is enough for most casual users today. 2 GB even works. But give it a few more years and 4 GB will become very restrictive even for somebody who doesn't do much on their computers.

Personally, I'm not going to make any claims that "X KB/MB/GB/PB/EB/etc. will be all you'll ever need in your lifetime" because it seems quite likely that whatever I pick ... it'll turn out to be wrong.

Re:Wow, end of an era.

[Minwee]

Remember the old Sun slogan: The network is the computer.

I thought Sun's slogan was "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it."

Re:Wow, end of an era.

[Anonymous Coward]

> Boy did that hardware last and last and last in comparison to the hardware of today.

If you assemble your own kit from mid-range components and a high-quality power supply, your computer will last and last, too. Many pre-built machines are shit. :D

When it comes to laptops, I've had really good results from my Panasonic fully rugged Toughbook. I've been using (and abusing) the thing daily for eight years now and -other than the present-since-the-day-I-bought-it and gradually worsening whine from the backlight electronics- the machine no signs of punking out. The damn thing even still has its original keyboard installed.

Re: Wow, end of an era.

[Megane]

I suspect that all the automatic exploits on SSH these days are expecting x86, if for no other reason than that the botnet people don't want to have to support too many architectures. I have an old Mac G3 (the blue tower) running 10.4 that I am still using as an internet server (I plan to retire it in a few months when other stuff isn't a priority), and every now and then SSH is wedged and won't connect remotely. I suspect one of those "automatic exploits" every now and then manages to hit a bug in that version of SSH which locks it up without a proper crash.

Re:Wow, end of an era.

[jbolden]

Sun wasn't that. The 128 RAM wasn't cheap but the 2G HD meant they were skimping. I bet those systems were around $5-7k or so well under double what an x86 workstation would cost.

As for getting professors to give up old equipment, start metering the electricity and billing the department.

Re:Wow, end of an era.

[jbolden]

No you couldn't. 16mb RAM was out the but was very expensive and many motherboards wouldn't support more than 4MB SIMMs (1 and 2MB SIMMS were still the norm for PCs). Good motherboards (in full tower cases) had at most 8 slots. So I'm going with 128MB as an upper limit.

Re:Wow, end of an era.

[dougmc]

I was asking about the Sparcstation 10, not a PC.

Wikipedia says "The SS10 can hold a maximum of 512 MB RAM in eight slots", so that means we need 64MB modules for it, and I'm not sure they were available yet in 1992.

I've got a SS20 in my garage, and it's got 208 MB of memory -- which wasn't too bad at all, "back in the day" anyways.

Re:Wow, end of an era.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a very similar SparcStation 20 here, however, it has multiple HyperSPARC CPUs and support for those was always difficult with linux. Does anyone have a recommendation what OS to run on one of those?

Re:Wow, end of an era.

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if you could actually get 512 MB into a SS10 in 1992 -- were chips of sufficient density available yet?),

I was working at a CFD company in '92. Our largest machine had 64 MB of RAM.

I remember looking (via rsh) at all our workstations in '96 for machines with free slots that we could bulk up with RAM. We got Ultra Sparcs and eventually an E3000 with *1 GB* of RAM and Solaris 2.5. That was ~ '98 I think.

Re:Wow, end of an era.

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember the old Sun slogan: The network is the computer.

[ Yes, I'm that old. ]

Old? LOL. That was during the dot com boom around the turn of the century, barely fifteen years ago.

Had a Sun 3/260 (among the last of Sun's Motorola 68k based servers) and 4/260 (pre-SPARCstation SPARC server) myself. Solaris sucks, SunOS rules!

Re:Wow, end of an era.

[ZorinLynx]

>As for getting professors to give up old equipment, start metering the electricity and billing the department.

HAH I wish. It's funny because if this junk were x86 we would have simply virtualized it years ago. But it's SPARC and there (still) isn't a good emulator for sun4m. I think one was "getting there" but was still crashy when we tried it last.

Re:Wow, end of an era.

[Anonymous Coward]

I was just thinking about SPARC the other day. My old boss runs this electronics junk shop. He is closing down this month forever but I saw him in the back, taking apart old Sparc 10's and Ultras and pulling out the addon cards to try to sell off eBay. Sad really. He should of done that 10 years ago when they were worth much more

That is somewhat sad, I agree.

:P

Oh, never mind you smilie-face-making retard.

Re:Wow, end of an era.

[jbolden]

Have you tried: Oracle VM Server for SPARC and Oracle Solaris Zones for virtualization? Anyway Oracle and Cloud Sigma both offer Solaris in the cloud. And of course there is nothing stopping you from upgrading him to a modern Solaris box.

Re:Wow, end of an era.

[Anonymous Coward]

16-32GB of Ram. You've fot you G's and M's confused :--)

But yeah, it was a good machine... To run NeXtstep on !

Re:Wow, end of an era.

[Bert64]

I still have 3 sparcstation-20 machines in the garage, one of which is maxed out with 512mb ram and 4 cpus... I doubt it would run firefox very smoothly tho.

Re: Wow, end of an era.

[Bert64]

Most of the things out their targeting ssh are just trying to brute force accounts, so they don't care what platform your ssh service is running on... If they are successful in getting in its highly likely that they wouldnt have a payload compatible with your system... I've setup a few such boxes as honeypots just to see what people would do with them.

Re:Wow, end of an era.

[Bert64]

If you could find the special extended dimms for the video slots... I have a fairly mediocre CG6 in the SS20s in my garage.

Re:Wow, end of an era.

[Bert64]

You could even get 128mb simms in 1992, they were just horrifically expensive...

Re:Wow, end of an era.

[virtual_mps]

Ordinary phones will probably pass 4G by the end of the decade.

Re:Wow, end of an era.

[TheRaven64]

When people talk about an n-bit CPU, they're conflating a lot of things:

• Register size (address and data register size on archs that have separate ones).
• Largest ALU op size
• Virtual address size
• Physical address size
• Bus data lane size
• Bus address lane size

It's very rare to find a processor where all of these are the same. Intel tried marketing the Pentium as a 64-bit chip for a while because it had 64-bit ALU ops. Most '64-bit' processors actually have something like a 48-bit virtual and 40-bit physical address space, but 64-bit registers and ALU ops (and some have 128-bit and 256-bit vector registers and ALU ops). The Pentium Pro with PAE had a 36-bit physical but 32-bit virtual address space, so you only got 4GB of address space per process, but multiple processes could use more than 4GB between them. This is the opposite way around to what you want for an OS, where you want to be able to map all of physical memory into your kernel's virtual address space and is one of the reasons that PAE kernels came with a performance hit.

Re:Wow, end of an era.

[dougmc]

He was saying that the SS10 could handle 512 MB in 1992, at time when the best PCs were maxed out at 32 MB or so.

The SS10 takes proprietary memory, and I know there was a firmware update that allowed it to use larger (32 MB, I think) sticks at some point. Ultimately, I don't think there was any way to put 512MB into a SS10 in 1992, even if the machine did eventually support it. I think 128 MB was more likely, though even that's very good for a desktop box back then.

As for 128MB simms in 1992, I have my doubts. This chart doesn't really try to list *everything* that was available, but even so -- it doesn't list 128 MB sticks until 1999. (It doesn't mention 64 MB sticks until 1999 as well, so clearly, it's missing some stuff.)

According to this, there were 64 MB SIMMs available in 1995 for a massive price -- $2600 each. (I didn't try to find the ad itself, however.)

systemd!!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's because of systemd. Soon debian will drop linux and support only systemd.

Re:systemd!!

[Virtucon]

systemd is sooo 1h2015

This sucks

[TheRealMindChild]

Debian was the last *working* linux for sparc32 platforms

Re:This sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Correction: last linux distro being maintained and updated for that platform.

No one stops those who still want to use sparc32 to keep using sparc32 with current versions of Debian.

Nor does anyone stop them from doing the packaging and maintaining themselves.

Re:This sucks

[phantomfive]

Now you''ll have to switch to OpenBSD (like everyone else who wants a working unix system /flame).

Re:This sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Gentoo still has sparc64 and well-supported freedom from systemd, too.

Captcha (no kidding!): quality

Re:This sucks

[Cramer]

If you're still USING a sparc32 system, you should rethink your life choices. :-) sparc64 systems are readily available for dirt. (you can even find some with SBUS interfaces.)

HOWEVER, this move by debian results in the dropping of sparc64 as well. (which is a seriously boneheaded move.)

Re:This sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't mean it will not work. It just means *officially* it will no longer be supported. Unofficial support will be maintained as long as people make it functional.

Debian is voluntary effort. So volunteer and make it work.

Yes, meant MB. It's been so long since I regularly

[aussersterne]

used that abbreviation that it just doesn't roll off the fingers any longer.

So funny, but yeah, totally true.

[aussersterne]

The 386 box that I installed Linux on my first time around was 4MB (4x1MB 30-pin SIMMs). 4MB! I mean, holy god, that's tiny. It seemed sooooo big compared to the 640kb of 8-bit PCs, and yet it's basically the same order of magnitude. Not even enough to load a single JPG snapshot from a camera phone these days.

Re:So funny, but yeah, totally true.

[Anonymous Coward]

> Not even enough to load a single JPG snapshot from a camera phone these days.

Surprisingly, this is not true!

JPEG was designed back in the 80s and 90s by a bunch of smart guys who wanted something that would work for print and screen. So, they predicted that one would reasonably want to work with images that could not be reasonably be displayed in full resolution on the hardware of the day, but might be handled line by line by a printer.

So, a JPEG decoder can downscale a JPEG on the fly. When it does this, it only loads the data required to display the downscaled image. It *is* a time/space tradeoff, but it *does* let you see and edit an image that you might otherwise be unable to work with.

Re:So funny, but yeah, totally true.

[DamonHD]

I used to run a SPARC box with 4MB (yes, mega) as my gateway/firewall machine when I was one of the few ISPs in the UK with (a) a live 'Internet' connection and (b) any sort of firewall.

I called the machine 'lemon' (http://www.exnet.com/NTP/ARC/ARC.html lemon.exnet.com) because it was (as a safety measure) pretty much incapable of running a compiler in that space, but it ran a mail proxy and firewall (http://www.exnet.com/ExFilter/V1.1.3-manual.html which I wrote to make sure I understoof what was going on) just fine.

Rgds

Damon

Re:So funny, but yeah, totally true.

[aussersterne]

I didn't know that, though based on what I do know about the jpeg format, it makes a kind of sense that this would be possible. Thanks for posting this, great nugget of information!

Re:So funny, but yeah, totally true.

[virtual_mps]

Yes, you can load a jpg in 4M, but you can no longer load the kernel. :)

How about fixing libnettle breakage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck me, it's broken many packages for almost two months now. libnettle maintainer washes their handle of it saying 6 is fine, but when almost everything in the repos is linked to so.4, you're greeted with nothing but segfaults. The fix? Uninstall almost everything and not have a system. It's little wonder most users and maintainers moved to Ubu.

Re: How about fixing libnettle breakage?

[Anonymous Coward]

What in god's name are you talking about?

If only the other distros would follow...

[Anonymous Coward]

My office just spent a hojillion dollars on an oracle "supercluster" because they seem to think that nothing is better/faster/stronger/whatever than SPARC.
My project is doomed.

Re:If only the other distros would follow...

[nbvb]

We've got ~20 of them. Those SuperClusters really DO kick some ass though ... when you get random users calling up saying "I don't know what you guys did but we've never had performance like this in 20 years" - yeah, color me impressed.

Isn't cheap, but a ton cheaper than second system effect.

Re:If only the other distros would follow...

[rubycodez]

For certain applications that is a true statement about "nothing better/faster/stronger" than Sparc. The top TPC-C benchmark is by Oracle's T5-8 server, for example. Maybe your project's biggest problem is your attitude.

odd

[Anonymous Coward]

In Debian-land, old and outdated is best.

Less and less universal.

[Anonymous Coward]

But thats what happen with redhat based distributions.

About the time

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing surprising here. Sparc suffers from a terminal case of bitrot. First most hardware is retired or stops working, second the development toolchains stop working because they have nowhere to be tested, third the operating systems stop working, and fourth, distributions drop support. Fifth - the architecture is only remembered by a dozen of retired old farts and mentioned in a Wikipedia article and a handful of hobbyist websites (the stage at which Alpha is right now). Farewell Sparc, and RIP.

SPARC != proprietary; SPARC == open

[Anonymous Coward]

[...] and is now even more rare and given its proprietary nature [...]

I never got this: SPARC is probably the least least proprietary architecture out there.

First, anyone can license (www.sparc.org) and sell SPARC CPUs, just like you can license ARM. Try going to Intel and trying to license their latest architectures. They even use OpenBoot for their "BIOS" / firmware, which was available to anyone as IEEE 1275.

Second, you can buy SPARC servers (see above) from at least two vendors (Oracle and Fujitsu), and run Solaris (or anything else) on them.

You can even get GPL licensed HDL for some of the earlier T-series processors: https://lwn.net/Articles/243874/

Re:SPARC != proprietary; SPARC == open

[TWX]

SPARC != commodity either. Can't go to the local store and pick up an ATX-form-factor SPARC motherboard and processor off-the-shelf.

Granted, SPARC isn't completely discontinued, but if Debian can't find enough developers to work on the platform then that shows them there isn't enough interest in order to be able to keep it alive.

Re:SPARC != proprietary; SPARC == open

[Anonymous Coward]

if Debian can't find enough developers to work on the platform then that shows them there isn't enough interest in order to be able to keep it alive.

The difficulty finding developers could be due to how the recent switch to systemd has badly splintered the Debian community.

Systemd has caused enough problems for casual desktop users, but it has been very problematic for those running servers. Those using Debian for serious computing need an init system that works reliably. The vast number of systemd problems mentioned in Debian bug reports and on the Debian mailing lists show that it isn't an option for these serious Debian users.

With security being such an issue these days, running old versions of Debian typically isn't an option. Since almost all of the other major Linux distros also use systemd now, these Debian users have had no choice but to look elsewhere.

Some have moved to FreeBSD. Some have moved to OpenBSD. Some have even moved to Windows. But the main thing to remember is that they've had to move away from Linux completely.

Since Debian's users also tend to be its contributors, the loss of these expert users means that they aren't contributing to Debian any longer. After all, why would they? They can't use Debian in its current state, so to them it's useless.

Debian really neutered itself, as a community-run project, with its switch to systemd. Driving away its best users was not a smart thing to do.

Re:SPARC != proprietary; SPARC == open

[Anonymous Coward]

The difficulty finding developers could be due to how the recent switch to systemd has badly splintered the Debian community.

As someone who has actually used Debian on sparc for the past couple of years I can tell you for sure that this has absolutely nothing to do with systemd. It was clearly on the way out years ago. This is not something that just fell out of the blue.

Re:SPARC != proprietary; SPARC == open

[rl117]

SPARC certainly, and the same previously applied to alpha and hppa (and m68k). So long as the kernel and toolchain are well supported, porting isn't too onerous. But once the kernel and/or toolchain become flaky, it's dicey for development and end use. I used to be quite involved in powerpc porting (I got a G4 mac mini to run Debian powerpc, which was my primary development system for around five years). I quit doing powerpc work a couple of years back when the system was too slow for practical work compared with contemporary hardware.

The main factor in a port's viability is an active developer pool contributing time to maintain it, and a port which is sustained only by dedicated people with obsolete hardware is doomed to eventual failure--the hardware pool is restricted and the number of developers is even less, so it's an inevitable case of attrition. When Sun stopped selling SPARC hardware at the lower end--where individual developers could afford them--its fate was sealed. The same thing also applies to powerpc to a lesser extent--most developers such as myself got powerpc hardware from Apple as a cheap way to get a big endian platform. When Apple dropped powerpc, there was little else to fill the gap. While I would love an IBM OpenPOWER system, the reality is that it's too expensive to justify and unless you get a genuine pool of developers bought into it, it's not going to have decent support. But take a non-x86 platform like ARM, that's still genuinely viable and will be for the foreseeable future.

Regarding the systemd comment, while I think the practical reality of hardware availability and obsolescence are the primary factor here, I do think it does have a small part to play. Consider that support for all these less common architectures was integrated into Debian over many years, and that some of this support comes in the form of special-cases in all sorts of init scripts and other support files. It's inevitable that some parts of this support for non-x86 architectures will regress with systemd unless it's specifically ported to the systemd equivalents (if possible).

As for me, let's just say my powerpc system is now running FreeBSD.

Re:SPARC != proprietary; SPARC == open

[Eythian]

That's quite a good effort, managing to turn something quite unrelated into a rant about systemd.

I think you're 100% wrong, but good effort.

Re:SPARC != proprietary; SPARC == open

[Anonymous Coward]

No, this is definitely not about systemd. While the crowd here at slashdot always likes to make that the bogeyman, at some point some people here need to realize that systemd is just not that important in the grand scheme of things that it's responsible for everything that happens.

From my own impression, the most important factor contributing to the demise of sparc as a platform in Debian was the lack of availability of fast build machines. Regularily having to wait up to 40 days until a package was finally built because the builders couldn't keep up with the load is highly problematic. This stalled a lot of things such as transitions (waiting for package $pkg to be built or rebuilt on sparc), and I suspect the security people also weren't very pleased with the situation, either (although security updates obviously get priority with the builders).

he finally retired.

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess that guy finally retired along with his box.

I was thinking of "high end" in terms of

[aussersterne]

what consumers had access to by walking into a retail computer dealership (there were many independent white box makers at the time) and saying "give me your best."

You're probably right about me underestimating the graphics, though it's hard to remember back that far. I'm thinking 800x600 was much more common. If you could get 1024x768, it was usually interlaced (i.e. "auto-headache") and rare if I remember correctly to be able to get with 24-bit color—S3's first 16-bit capable chips didn't come out until late-1991, if I remember correctly, though I could be off.

SCSI was possible, but almost unheard of as stock, you either had to buy an add-on card and deal with driver/compatibility questions or one of the ESDISCSI bridge boards or similar. Same thing with ethernet, token, or any other dedicated networking hardware and stack. Most systems shipped with a dial-up "faxmodem" at the time, and users were stuck using Winsock on Windows 3.1. It was nontrivial to get it working. Most of the time, there was no real "networking" or "networking" support in the delivered hardware/software platform; faxmodems were largely used for dumb point-to-point connections using dial-up terminal emulator software.

And in the PC space, the higher-end you went, the less you were able to actually use the hardware for anything typical. Unless you were a corporate buyer, you bought your base platform as a whitebox, then added specialized hardware matched with specialized software in a kind of 1:1 correspondence—if you needed to perform task X, you'd buy hardware Y and software Z, and they'd essentially be useful only for task X, or maybe for task X1, X2, and X3, but certainly not much else—the same is even true for memory itself. Don't forget this is pre-Windows95, when most everyone was using Win16 on DOS. We can discuss OS/2, etc., but that again starts to get into the realm of purpose-specific and exotic computing in the PC space. There were, as I understand, a few verrry exotic 486 multiprocessors produced, but I've never even heard of a manufacturer and make/model for these—only the rumor that it was possible—so I doubt they ever made it into sales channels of any kind. My suspicion (correct me if I'm wrong) was that they were engineered for particular clients and particular roles by just one or two orgnaizations, and delivered in very small quantities; I'm not aware of any PC software in 1992 timeframe that was even multiprocessor-aware, or any standard to which it could have been coded. The Pentium processor wasn't introduced until '93 and the Pentium Pro with GTL+ and SMP capabilities didn't arrive until 1995. Even in 1995, most everything was either Win16 or 8- or 16-bit code backward compatible to the PC/XT or earlier, and would remain that way until around the Win98 era.

The UNIX platforms were standardized around SCSI, ethernet, big memory access, high-resolution graphics, and multiprocessing and presented an integrated environment in which a regular developer with a readily available compiler could take advantage of it all without particularly unusual or exotic (for that space) tactics.

Re:I was thinking of "high end" in terms of

[dougmc]

what consumers had access to by walking into a retail computer dealership ... and saying "give me your best"

Of course, by that metric, Suns weren't available at all.

SCSI was somewhat rare in a PC in 1992, yes, but not that uncommon. (Anybody remember the Adaptec AHA-1542B? It came out in 1990.)

800x600 was more common, but 1024x768 was available. I don't recall if it was all interlaced or not, but I do recall how much that interlacing sucked!

Ethernet (or token ring, that was still somewhat common) was quite common in environments where it made sense. Not in a one computer home of course, but in a business, sure. How else were you going to get at the NetWare server?

And in the PC space, the higher-end you went, the less you were able to actually use the hardware for anything typical.

That's not true. A high end business class PC would run games just fine in 1992, for example. (As long as it had the right graphics, anyways.)

You might need to pick a different boot floppy, however. (Windows 95 certainly did improve things there!)

I'm not sure if this applied to the few SMP PCs available the time or not, however -- I got my first one a few years later, a Pentium Pro. That wasn't specialized -- it would run anything, though I imagine that many things would ignore the second cpu. (I ran Linux on it, which did use the second cpu.)

The UNIX platforms were standardized around SCSI, ethernet, big memory access, high-resolution graphics, and multiprocessing and presented an integrated environment in which a regular developer with a readily available compiler could take advantage of it all without particularly unusual or exotic (for that space) tactics.

I understand nostalgia, but ... no.

SCSI was the (somewhat) new hotness in 1992, yes, but other drive busses had been used in the past and were still used in 1992. The large SGI I administered a few years later had ESDI drives, for example. (But it also had SCSI, and the desktop SGIs we had were SCSI only.)

Ethernet was also the current favorite, but other networking protocols were in use at the time. I was working at IBM in 1992 and most of the company used token ring at the time -- that's what I had coming to my desk, where I had a PS/2 running OS/2.

As for "big memory", yes, that was always the norm for big computers, whatever the OS -- big computers had big resources available.

As for multiprocessors, remember, the Sparcstation 10 was Sun's first multi cpu desktop box. Multiprocessing was somewhat common in mainframes and minicomputers by them (whatever the OS), but it was rare on the desktop, even *nix desktops.

As for graphics ... most Unix platforms had no graphics at all then. Sun's desktop offerings did, and they did have decent graphics, but they weren't really better than high end PCs that were available at the time. (SGI went more after the desktop graphics than Sun did, but maybe Sun had some stronger offerings that I'm not aware of.)

As for "integrated environments", I think in 1992 Sun still shipped compilers stock with their OSes, but it was just a few years later that they became a very expensive licensed add-on. gcc was available, of course, but getting it installed was kind of a chore, and it was inferior to the Sun compilers in some ways. Alas, g77 wasn't available until a while later.

And really, the environment wasn't "integrated" like it is now. No IDEs, anyways -- your environment was X windows, and you got to use vi or emacs or whatever. Really, the programming environments on a PC were integrated before they were on Unix systems as far as I know.

Re:I was thinking of "high end" in terms of

[jbolden]

This was exclusively for workstations but in terms of multi processor there definitely were multi-processor 486s sold. I had a buddy with 4x486. SCO was the typical OS for these boxes. OS/2 and Linux were both working on it and would achieve it.

Also also with SCO the x86/i860 combo was popular (for an exotic workstation). The 486 while having good floating point math sucked at vector math. The i860 while good at vector math was bad at multi-tasking. There were both motherboards and compilers to take advantage of this combo which was a winner. It allowed you to build a workstation for under $10k that was a bad version of MIPS style workstations.

Re:I was thinking of "high end" in terms of

[virtual_mps]

The memory thing was basically "dial-a-pricepoint". I remember machines with a base price on the order of $5k, with $10k+ of memory (which was less than you probably have in your phone).

I'm also amused whenever one of these sparc nostalgia threads comes up, because the way I remember things the cool kids had the SGIs and DECs and the Suns were kinda the lame/cheap crap, basically the PCs of the UNIX world. They exploded during the .com bubble because you could buy those (honestly, horribly designed internally) pizza boxes by the pallet load so a generation of kids came up thinking that was the only thing that existed due to their sheer numbers.

Meh...

[Anonymous Coward]

computing died for me when Sun went. The Network was the Computer

Debian on an Ultra 5

[spaceyhackerlady]

The standard desktop at the company I work for used to be a Sun Ultra 5, and when the company imploded I picked an Ultra 5 with a fast processor (400 MHz), put some more memory in it, took it home and put Debian on it. It worked fine. Entirely decent interactive performance, like a fast Pentium 2. Not a box for video editing or other high-CPU/bandwidth activities, but fine otherwise.

I was amused to note that it wasn't a Windows box, so it was immune to Windows attacks. It wasn't an x86 box, so it was immune to x86 attacks. I guess I amuse easily. :-)

We had a pile of 32 bit SparcStations. We (literally) couldn't give them away.

...laura

Re: Debian on an Ultra 5

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd be better off running NetBSD or OpenBSD on Sparc.

Re: Debian on an Ultra 5

[rubycodez]

Just a word of warning, NetBSD autobuilds too much without testing, both for the OS and for the repositories. OpenBSD you might find more stable and with packages that work; the project leader and many of the core devs are sparc and sparc64 architecture experts.

systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

call lionheart, he needs to port sparc to systemd asap

Thanks, Oracle

[Anonymous Coward]

Our group used to be 95% Solaris and 5% x86. Then Oracle took over. We've retired hundreds of Sun systems and installed HP Proliants in their place, to get out from under Oracle. It's too bad, because the hardware was rock-solid, as was the OS.

is not a "highly-used architecture anymore"

[angel'o'sphere]

How retarded is that?

Most SUNs I work on are SPARC, actually all SUNs I have worked with during the last 15 years where SPARCs.

Did they run Linux? Debian? No! Obviously they ran Sun Solaris. And still do. But I guess there are plenty of shops that abuse big iron to run plenty of virtual machines.

The Debian stance might make sense (for them). Their explanation does not, though.

Re:is not a "highly-used architecture anymore"

[msobkow]

Do you comprehend the difference between the old 32-bit SPARC processors and the ones Oracle sells now?

I thought not.

Turn in your geek card.

Yeah, Debian is sooo popular on Intel....

[unixisc]

This decision makes sense, since Debian is so dominant on Intel boxes that they can't afford resources to support SPARC - even though the port already exists and it's simply a matter of migrating the same incremental changes that are there on Lintel to SPARC.

So much for the claim Linux fans make of the OS being 'everywhere' - here is a UNIX only CPU: no version of Windows ever ran on it, only UNIX-like OSs, such as SunOS, Solaris, Linux and *BSD.

Re:Yeah, Debian is sooo popular on Intel....

[Anonymous Coward]

I makes sense because gcc is (already has?) deprecating sparc32.

Re:Yeah, Debian is sooo popular on Intel....

[virtual_mps]

If it's so easy, why don't you take over the port and show us how it's done? Debian has been very up front for years now that the sparc port was on its way out due to lack of interest; if anyone really cared, they would have stepped up to maintain it. The problem here isn't that it's impossible, or even a theoretical challenge, the problem is that the sparc hardware in general isn't really all that great and there isn't really a compelling reason to use it when people are literally throwing out higher-spec'd x86 gear. Only on the highest end is the sparc line potentially interesting, and nobody spends that much money to run a research project as an OS; by the time the hardware is available to hobbyist developers it's obsolete--and again, why bother plugging in a really power-hungry system and spend years developing for a platform that, by the time it's usable, will be outperformed by tomorrow's junk?

Open Source in business usage

[unixisc]

You are thinking of GNU software. As Eric Raymond pointed out, the more that Open Source software is used - whether by business or by freeloaders, the more useful it ends up being, as a lot of modifications & improvements are made over time to make it address all that diverse usage

Re:Open Source in business usage

[phantomfive]

Nah. I'm thinking that 'useful' has more than one definition, and "real business use" is not necessarily the most important, unless you are the most rabid capitalist.

Got it backwards

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian (Linux in general) isn't exactly a highly-used Os on Sparc, it never was, and it only even made the slightest bit of sense on archaic Sparc-based workstations. Investing in a T-series platform and failing to leverage it to its fullest potential right out of the gate by throwing Linux on it is a waste of funds and otherwise excellent hardware.