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Debian Drops SPARC Platform Support

Posted by Soulskill on from the not-with-a-bang dept.

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.

9 of 152 comments (clear)

  1. Sad Day by OverlordQ · · Score: 3, Interesting

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

    --
    Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
  2. ran debian on sparc for over 10 years by AndroSyn · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:ran debian on sparc for over 10 years by Lumpy · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
    2. Re:ran debian on sparc for over 10 years by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

      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

  3. Re:How soon until x86 is dropped? by Guspaz · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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).

  4. Wow, end of an era. by aussersterne · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    STOP . AMERICA . NOW
  5. SPARC != proprietary; SPARC == open by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    [...] 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/

    1. Re:SPARC != proprietary; SPARC == open by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      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.

  6. Re:Yeah, Debian is sooo popular on Intel.... by virtual_mps · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?