From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Joshua Uziel Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2001 13:19:36 +0000 Subject: Re: where is ultra linux going? Message-Id: List-Id: References: In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: ultralinux@vger.kernel.org * Martin A. Marques [010302 04:16]: > Yes, but it seems as the other platforms are having lots of more attention, > especially due to the fact that SUN isn't giving much help, because they > support there Solaris operating system. Well, honestly, who can blame Sun? Things are going so well that they don't seem to feel that they should do anything. Actually, I take that back... some people within Sun see the value and are cooperating with the SPARC/Linux developers... some examples: * Machines are loaned to linux distributors for working on distributions as well as showing SPARC/Linux at tradeshows. Most (if not all) SPARCs at LWENY recently were owned by Sun. This included the one in the SuSE booth, the one in the Slackware/BSDI booth, and the one in the Debian booth. Most of the work put into Slackware and Debian for SPARC are built on machines loaned by Sun. * Sun Microelectronics for a while involved DaveM in working to improve Linux support for the AX motherboards. * I'm being loaned an AX1105-500 for the purpose of working on support for it and the new Sun Blade 100 (which is very similar). Most of the other platforms have a Unix variant that is dead or at least on it's way... Solaris still seems to be quite healthy. > With respect of the distros, yes, we have just installed SUSE on an ultra5, > and I have been looking at the Debian distribution. But are they fully 64bit? > Have all the aplications been compiled for 64 bit SPARC? I know that this > isn't the case of Debian, and I'm starting to think that the solution is to > stick with Solaris or change the architecture (alpha maybe). Speaking with Ben Collins (Debian) and Thorsten Kukuk (SuSE), they've both played with 64-bit userspace. It seems that glibc is more or less ready, but the compiler (eventually gcc 3.0) still needs work. Using Jakub Jelinek's hacked compiler, though, you can now have a 64-bit userspace on SPARC/Linux, but it's more or less experimental. In other words, a 64-bit userland is "coming soon", but not here yet. Besides, for the most part, a 64-bit userspace isn't all that needed. Even Solaris ships with mostly 32-bit applications, and only 64-bit when it really counts. > It's all IMHO. Of course. :) - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe ultralinux" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org