Why is BSD at the bottom of the OS category it should be above webservices or whatever.
The other day I fell upon the unfortunate news that FreeBSD for SPARC64 is being closed soon. Evidentally the people working on it don’t have time and their machines can’t keep up anymore. I find this unfortunate, and while I personally use OpenBSD on my SunBlade 2500, I am slowly watching the distro’s dry up. Soon there won’t be much left aside from MooBSD, OpenBSD, and T2SDE, which as far as I can tell is the hard version of gentoo. T2 will probably support sparc until the guy making it dies, but I sure as hell don’t want to try to learn how that thing even works, especially when BSD’s performance is great so far.
So… I’m curious. Does BSD allow Forks? I would hate to see FreeBSD disappear for the platform personally, and maybe people could be put together to work on it (I know a few…)… I just don’t wanna see it disappear ya kno
You could try and pick up that mantel, I downloaded some BSD iso’s last night to start to mess around on, so other then freenas I dont have much bsd exp and most of my freenas exp is from gui (not all but most things I need it to do can be done from there)
There just doesn’t seem to be any love for the platform, from everything I tried Gentoo was basically the only thing that “works”[*] (Debian sort of still supports it, but that was well out of my comfort zone). Of the BSD’s only OpenBSD runs on the T2 (not even NetBSD supports it…), everything else only really supports ancient hardware.
Not quite sure why this is, possibly the commercialisation of the “hobby” making it uninteresting to bother with these architectures, especially from the Linux distro side of things.
[*] installation was a huge pain though, should turn my notes into a post sometime.
How much of a pain would it be to just pick up where MCL left off? Apparently the notes for what the distro needs are findable, so somewhere is the notes for like up to release 13…
Could I get a group of people together and just take over?
Yeah but not T2 M2 etc support. thats why theres no sparc interest.
When I was looking into this it seemed like the port was almost done. I’m not sure what was still required. Since my experience with hardware, on C in general, is, errr, limited, to put it mildly, I didn’t really research that avenue further.
Sorry, not sure I understand your reply, are you saying OpenBSD does not suoport the UltraSPARC T2? Because according to their website it does (but didn’t test myself), making it the only BSD to support it, as far as I’m aware.
The M8, I don’t think is supported by anything but Solaris. Linux, as far as I’ve been able to find, supports up to the T4 (which implies no support for T5, M7/S7 and M8). But it’s anyone’s guess how up-to-date that is.
Or are you referring to the M-series of Enterprise servers, which use SPARC64 CPUs from Fujitsu (which are supposedly supported by Linux, not sure about BSD)?
At the moment it builds packages, however I have… plans. If you know how I operate I like to poke and prod and then force the machine to do something horrible that it probably shouldn’t, then optimize it to work better and better.
I was thinking since my machine has basically an X600 PRO in it I’d make it run minecraft 1.0. I have no interest in looking at old unixes or SunOS or Solaris for this thing. Museum pieces are boring. I want the machine to do something crazy. Like demo scene but awful.
Later on I want it as my main BBS machine as its multithreading is absolutely bonkers for that sorta thing.
And if it doesn’t become a server it’ll become a desktop machine for me. I have a lot of plans for a lot of machines.
All you need to do is demonstrate to the freebsd core team that keeping freebsd on sparc64 in Tier2/3 is:
a) viable - show there’s enough time and finances available to dedicate to CI/CD and resolving of issues
b) worthwhile - there’s enough interest in sparc64 going forward (e.g. there’s a community of users and developers)
First one is easier, grab a couple of dual socket 7742 machines, stick some of those drives that wendell got in them, with some light scripting to keep cross compiling going and you’re done.
No what you need to do is actually maintain sparc64 in FreeBSD if you want to keep it. Core isn’t getting rid of it because it’s old, they’re getting rid of it because nobody is maintaining it after a long warning period where they have been saying “if nobody fixes these things we’re going to have to remove it”.
What’s wrong with sticking with openbsd? As the platform ages and interest in it wanes, it makes more sense to consolidate effort. If I were you I would volunteer to keep openbsd going, especially since they are enthusiastic about supporting lots of platforms.
I always hate it when a platform has to go away because one or two people don’t have time to maintain it. It means less options later, and I’m a person who believes even an IBM 5150 has a place in modern day use. If its the resource you have, you can make it do anything.
It’d be a shame to just have freebsd poof like that. While I’m not using it now, I’m very likely to backup my drives, install freebsd, and work on something there for a while. I know many people who do the same. It’d be a shame for it to just be gone, and really not worth the drama over it all. If a guy doesn’t have time to actively work on it, advertise more than just the email chain. I don’t often even look at it in my email that often, I was just curious the other day and found the sparc platform was closing.
I didn’t hear anything on BSDNow from Jupiter Broadcasting, nothing came in my RSS feeds or popped up in any of the 45 chats I’m in. Just, there in the email chain. And when I ask if I can help them I get pushback. It all seems rather ridiculous to me.