Debian Drops Support For SPARC

[oibaf]

I have a couple of v240 running old Ubuntu 6.06. I had boot problems with other distros.

[crash]

I still have a SUN e420R that runs debian and it would be nice to have it upgraded from wheezy in the next few years.

[justinzane]

Who uses Debian on SPARC?

No, not trying to be sarcastic. I'd assumed that (1) SPARC is almost as dead as Itanic and that (2) the few SPARC users left were contractually tied to Oracle or Fujitsu and therefore used a RHEL-based distro or Solaris on their SPARC boxes. Since the dropping of SPARC on Debian seems controversial, I'd like to learn who does use that combo?

[cb88]

The problem is not bugs in themselves, but sparc-skilled manpower to deal with them. And it seems Debian is lacking manpower to get up-to-date with the sparc world. The question is then : as you can't fix problems to get the sparc port as stable as the others, with Jessie not so far from the stable state (i personnaly have problems with the systemd thing, but it seems we can still use sysvinit, fine), can you just wait for the magic to happen, or ditch the one ill-stated port and give the rest of the world what the are waiting for.

Agreed it isn't a technical can't be done or even nobody wants this anymore type problem... its small technical problems that noone is bothering to fix. All in all Linux on Sparc just works ... there are a few packages that don't but its not like there are lots of packages that are broken upstream. Firefox and Java are the two big ones that are in fact broken upstream.

[Morpheus]

Once again blowing things out of perportion. It is unlikely that Sparc will be dropped as the kernel issues are not that big. I believe part of the problem is that Debian is using older kernels where the bugs were not fixed while upstream kernels are already working and stable.

The Gcc issues aren't that huge either.... it sounds like a packaging issue rather than a fundamental problem with Gcc.

There are issues though... but I think they can be resolved by better cooperaition between Debian, Gentoo and FreeBSD (which has Firefox fixes up to FF 24ESR I think)

The problem is not bugs in themselves, but sparc-skilled manpower to deal with them. And it seems Debian is lacking manpower to get up-to-date with the sparc world. The question is then : as you can't fix problems to get the sparc port as stable as the others, with Jessie not so far from the stable state (i personnaly have problems with the systemd thing, but it seems we can still use sysvinit, fine), can you just wait for the magic to happen, or ditch the one ill-stated port and give the rest of the world what the are waiting for.

[BSDude]

OpenSPARC had so much potential.

[cb88]

Once again blowing things out of perportion. It is unlikely that Sparc will be dropped as the kernel issues are not that big. I believe part of the problem is that Debian is using older kernels where the bugs were not fixed while upstream kernels are already working and stable.

The Gcc issues aren't that huge either.... it sounds like a packaging issue rather than a fundamental problem with Gcc.

There are issues though... but I think they can be resolved by better cooperaition between Debian, Gentoo and FreeBSD (which has Firefox fixes up to FF 24ESR I think)

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Debian Drops Support For SPARC

Debian has removed their SPARC CPU architecture support from Debian 8.0 "Jessie" testing and it might also be removed from Debian unstable as well...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTY3NTc