On 06/06/2013 05:25 PM, Saso Kiselkov wrote:
Let's get down to brass tax here: none of the Illumos developers (and
that includes me) particularly care about SPARC, because that platform
has little to no future. Hardware is only available from one or two
vendors at tremendous markup, which means the only ones who are going to
buy it are large enterprise customers who are buying as part of a
solution package, rendering Illumos on SPARC no more than a small-time
hobbyist's project running on phased-out old clunkers.
This is a pretty narrow view. I respectfully submit that it doesn't
really reflect reality. SOME of it, yes, but not exclusively.
But we've already established that the Illumos crowd thinks the whole
world should be running on PCs...therefore Illumos just isn't the answer
here.
This is emphatically *not* the case. First of all, "the Illumos crowd"
includes me (I would hope) and I don't think that all of the world
should be running on PCs.
Ok, I must have misinterpreted you. If so, I apologize.
I don't care about a particular ISA - run
Illumos on whatever you want. What I do care about for *my* projects is
that they are cost-effective. And sadly, SPARC just isn't suitable for
me. Perhaps for some it is, and they are completely free to submit
patches, have they reviewed, and integrated, same as everybody else.
The Illumos community (not pointing at you specifically) has reacted
with everything short of outright hostility to any mention of SPARC. To
state that there's nothing but "phased-out old clunkers" in the
accessible SPARC community is complete bunk. When I can spend $250 for
a 1U rackmount machine that supports ~100 busy email accounts (plus
their spam and virus filtering, etc), plus about twenty database-backed
dynamic-content web sites, PLUS the database that's backing them, and
all the monitoring and metrics tools...that's serious business, not a
"clunker". It's not CURRENT, but who cares?
To dismiss all but the very latest stuff that the greazzzy salesmen
try to sell us this week is bogus, and contrary to the work we do as
professionals in just about every way.
Again I wish to stress that I am not singling YOU out, here. You
have made an effort at sincere communication on this, and I appreciate
it. This is the view from someone who is just outside the OI/Illumos
community, but who runs Solaris (primarily 10) on relatively recent (but
not current) hardware, for myself and for clients, to great GREAT
benefit. I am here to say that real work DOES get done in
other-than-Fortune-500 companies, and quite a bit gets done on last
year's SPARC boxes.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
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