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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.
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.
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.
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).
It's GNAA, arguably been trolling Slashdot as long as SPARC has been around.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
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.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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
No.. let him be stuck in a black pride party eternity..
Silence is a state of mime.
> 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.
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.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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?