[geeks] Solaris 9 changes

[Scott Howard]

On Thu, Jul 29, 2004 at 03:28:11PM -0400, Joshua Boyd wrote:
> I understand why it would be stupid to officially support the U1.  What
> I don't get is why they would put a boot time check in, rather than just
> deny that it is supported.

The boot time check was always there (to drop the US-1 into 32 bit mode)
- they just changed what it did...

It's important to recognise that what is being EOL'ed here is NOT
specifically the Ultra-1 (ie, the computer), it's the UltraSPARC I (ie,
the CPU). Last I looked there was nothing in Solaris 10 which was not
UltraSPARC I compatible, but it's quite likely that at some stage in the
future there will be. Based on the published Solaris life-cycle there
will be updates for Solaris 10 every few months for the next 2.5-3 years,
and patches for about 7-8 years - the last thing we would want to happen
is to break a platform where Solaris was working (even if it was
unsupported) by publishing a patch which introduced something which was
not US-I compatible!

  Scott.