While Oracle recently let go of some of their SPARC team, today marks the launch of the SPARC M8.

Besides incorporating the RHEL 7.4 changes from Red Hat into their recent Oracle Linux update, their Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) has received a few updates of its own.

Since last month's announcement by Oracle that they were essentially looking to offload Java EE to a new foundation, that new steward has now been named.

While Oracle recently laid off a ton of SPARC staff (and Solaris), not everyone was let go and it's still not instantly a dead platform. With Linux 4.14 there are some SPARC improvements for those relying upon this ex-Sun hardware.

While Oracle is slashing Solaris and SPARC jobs, their RHEL-derived Oracle Linux operating system continues getting pushed forward. Oracle Linux 7 Update 4 is now available as their re-based version off Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4.

Following word last month Oracle was looking to move Java EE off to a new (more open) steward, today developers have noticed Java EE in its entirety is available via GitHub.

It looks like the Oracle layoffs just before the US Labor Day indeed hit the SPARC and Solaris groups hard.

Oracle is celebrating Labor Day in America this weekend by reportedly doing a fresh round of layoffs and it's sounding like it could affect a number of heads.

Oracle is looking to move Java EE off into an open foundation for future development.

The first release candidate of Oracle's Java JDK 9 is now available for testing.

The mystery around the future of Solaris, ZFS, and SPARC continues with Oracle reportedly letting go of more developers and other staff members.

Oracle has pushed into public beta their first snapshot of the upcoming VirtualBox 5.2 virtualization software.

It looks like the SPARC M8 processor will end up getting released as an Oracle engineer today posted patches implementing support for the M8 with GCC.

Last week talk of Solaris heated up again with Solaris 12 being removed from the Oracle road-map, after rumors of Oracle canning Solaris occurred in early December, meanwhile there are also more layoffs happening at Oracle. Oracle finally issued a blog post this week with a bit more clarification on the matter.

With it looking certain now that Oracle is ending Solaris feature development with the cancelling of Solaris 12, here's a look back at the most popular Solaris news and milestones for the project over the years on Phoronix.

At the beginning of December there were rumors of Oracle canning Solaris and now that's finally been confirmed by Oracle more or less as they will not be delivering Solaris 12.

Oracle might be pulling the plug on the Solaris operating system, at least according to some new rumors.

The latest version of OpenIndiana, the Illumos-powered Solaris distribution letting OpenSolaris live on in community form, is now available.

The JDK 9 release schedule is indeed being pushed back by four months and now will be released in late July.

NetBeans 8.2 was released today as the newest version of the Java-focused integrated development environment currently developed by Oracle but still pursuing to become an Apache project.

After testing seven Linux distributions and eight BSDs on the new Xeon E5-2609 v4 Broadwell-EP + MSI X99A WORKSTATION system, I next decided to try getting some fresh Solaris-based results.

It's been more than five years since the launch of Illumos as the concerted, community-based effort around the OpenSolaris code-base. This truly-open Solaris stack continues to be at the heart of OpenIndiana, SmartOS, Dyson, and other operating systems.

For anyone still relying upon Java web-plugins in their browser, they are going to be deprecated with the upcoming Java 9.

For those still relying upon NetBeans as an integrated development environment primarily built around Java, the big 8.1 release is now available.

Randy Fishel of Oracle presented at this week's XDC2015 conference about the state of the DRM/KMS graphics drivers on Solaris.

Oracle's German team in Munich has announced the release of VirtualBox 5.0.4.

Today marks five years since the announcement of Illumos, the community-based derivative of OpenSolaris to create a fully open-source operating system.

While Debian just dropped support for SPARC and many are writing off SPARC as dead under Oracle with their offering of x86 servers, a new report out today suggests otherwise. It's being reported that Oracle plans to introduce "Sonoma" as a low-cost SPARC processor.

While Debian supports many CPU architectures, it's working to remove support for the Sun/Oracle SPARC architecture. As of this weekend, Debian has dropped SPARC from their unstable, experimental, and jessie-updates archives.

For those that missed it, Oracle quietly released the first beta of Solaris 11.3 earlier this week.