[rescue] Oracle kills Solaris

[Patrick Giagnocavo]

Very sad situation.  However, Illumos and related, lives on, and ZFS
has made it out into the wider world, so there's that.

I still believe that Solaris is better under memory pressure than
Linux, however, with RAM being so cheap these days, it doesn't matter
as much... I remember logging in to a heavily-laden Solaris machine
running many zones, with 2MB of free memory, yet SSH was still
responsive enough to use.

Should probably install Illumos or whatever and try to build a
software-service on top of it with zones. While I recognize Docker as
being useful, the sysadmin in me still finds it abhorrent.

On Wed, Sep 6, 2017 at 1:39 PM, Jonathan Patschke <jp at celestrion.net> wrote:
> On Wed, 6 Sep 2017, Dave McGuire wrote:
>
>>  I lurked on that list until I got sick of it.  I got the strong
>> impression that there are a bunch of x86 fanboys on there that think
>> anything that's not an x86 PC is "legacy", and they had zero interest in
>> supporting SPARC.
>
>
> You can thank Jonathan Schwartz for that.
>
> I personally decommissioned the last SPARC workstation at my day job
> because Sun quit making workstations.  At the time, we'd rather have run
> Cadence on Solaris.  It worked, and the engineers had gotten used to it,
> but we'd already been through a disruptive recall on our Blade 1500s, and
> at the end of our hardware support contract, Sun had literally nothing
> better[1] to sell us.
>
> They got replaced with mediocre Dells running Red Hat.  After the
> engineers got over redoing a decade of accumulated customization, they
> stopped caring.  Dell won.  The engineers were laying out ICs again, and I
> had one fewer platform to support.
>
> The least expensive SPARC machine I can find on Oracle's web site is, at
> $11k, almost twice as expensive as the least expensive POWER8 system from
> IBM and about five times as expensive as the least expensive Proliant from
> HPE, all at the same memory size and the same or greater CPU core count.
>
> The clear message from Sun and Oracle is that SPARC is not for you unless
> you're doing very wide HPC or whatever silly "throughput computing" niche
> the SPARC T was cut-out for.
>
>>  They seemed to fall under what I've been calling the "AS/400 problem",
>> people thinking that because there were AS/400s in 1988 that all AS/400s
>> are from 1988.  Just because there were SPARC systems in 1993 doesn't
>> mean all SPARC systems are from 1993.
>
>
> No, but all SPARC workstations are at least a decade old, and it's been
> nearly that long since Sun, Oracle, or Fujitsu competed at
> price/performance in small systems.  If they cared about open-source
> support for their platform, they'd at least release full documentation and
> have some sort of hobbyist buy/lease program.  No one is going to pay $11k
> to port a fork of an abandoned proprietary OS to undocumented hardware.
>
> When the only samples of a platform at reasonable affordability are
> end-of-life, that's a workable definition of "legacy."
>
>
> [1] The Ultra 25 did have a less infuriating chassis, I suppose.
> --
> Jonathan Patschke
> Austin, TX
> USA
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