[geeks] Solaris 9 changes

[Joshua Boyd]

On Wed, Jul 28, 2004 at 10:31:48PM +1000, Scott Howard wrote:

> > Current support that may be removed in a future release:
> > - fork() (?)

<snip>

Thanks for the explaination.

> > I'm surprised that sun4m support has lasted this long, as well as 32-bit
> > UltraSPARC. 
> 
> As a rule they won't drop support for a product until after the hardware
> itself has passed EOSL (End of Support Life). In the case of sun4m this
> didn't happen until September 2003 (SS5 was last shipped 9/98, and
> supported for 5 years after that).
> For UltraSPARC I it's a little more tricky. The Ultra-1 is long gone
> (EOSL was July 2003), however there are still E3000's and Ultra 2's out
> there that are not yet EOSL (and will not be at the time Sol10 ships)
> which have US-1's in them - although they are few and far between.

The Ultra-1 stopped shipping before the SS-5?  That's interesting.
 
> At the end of the day I think they just decided that it was easier to
> drop support for these few chips which haven't in themselves been sold
> for many years and thus be able to drop all 32 bit (on SPARC) kernel
> support.

It makes sense.  Besides, can't one run US-1s in 64bit mode, albeit with
a bug where users can crash the machine.  Or is Ultra-1 support going
away altogether.

It may be unreasonable, but it is kinda disappointing that the Ultra 1s
are being as supported as the Sun4ms where.  I still consider them to be
new and blazing fast machines after all.