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by rbanffy 1871 days ago
A fun way to make Oracle donate a machine would be to make an official POWER port.

That's a lot of work and I don't see IBM making a machine available.

3 comments

There are plenty of people who would donate a virtual machine or remote work environment for this sort of thing, if anyone was (seriously) interested in porting. Realistically, I doubt anyone wants to put that kind of effort in. Getting FreeBSD and more recently OpenBSD working on PowerNV platforms has taken a very large effort by the community, and those OSes already had some support for POWER/PowerPC. Illumos only has the x86 and (very bitrotted) SPARC support AFAIK, I believe there have been some attempts at bringing up ARM but don't see anything substantial.

More on topic, as someone sentimental for SPARC hardware and to an extent solaris, this is sad to see, but it feels like just a formality. I don't think illumos has worked properly on SPARC hardware since ... Ever? There were a few illumos distributions with SPARC builds but I always had trouble getting them to run on even a T2, seems there was little work done post rebranding from OpenSolaris for SPARC. Linux and OpenBSD have been much, much better on SPARC than Illumos, tinged with bitter irony...

> A fun way to make Oracle donate a machine would be to make an official POWER port.

We tried to convince Oracle to donate a SPARC machine for Debian but that unfortunately never happened for various reasons.

Convince Oracle to donate a machine... for an Oracle Solaris competitor?! Oracle was the one that shut down OpenSolaris in the first place!
The only way they’d do it is if someone made a Solaris-killer that ran on a SPARC-killer that could run an Oracle-killer database.

But IBM wouldn’t help someone to build an AIX-killer OS.