[ptribble]

Because it's not a stock gcc. It's specially modified to do things quite differently on SPARC. If it was a case of "just" upgrading we would have done it long ago.

As one of approximately 2 people who actually build illumos on SPARC, I can testify that the whole thing is enough of a maintenance burden that it's causing major problems.

(And I'll just fork a copy and use that; it's not as though the SPARC ecosystem is a moving target.)

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> (And I'll just fork a copy and use that; it's not as though the SPARC ecosystem is a moving target.)

This was actually one of my first questions on seeing the announcement - is Tribblix SPARC going to continue, or will this upstream change eventually EOL that as well?

[ptribble]

Tribblix SPARC will continue. While you lose any new features that go into illumos upstream, at least you don't keep getting broken by changes going into illumos upstream.

(This isn't a commitment for all time, naturally. At some point the SPARC hardware I have will stop working. But it turns out to be solidly built and impressively reliable.)

[yjftsjthsd-h]

So for the foreseeable future you intend to just freeze SPARC Tribblix on the last Illumos to support SPARC? I suppose it should stay ABI compatible with other components ~forever, so that shouldn't even hold back other pieces of the system.

[ptribble]

Pretty much it, yeah. If there's anything useful upstream then it will get pulled in, and there's a still a lot of worthwhile cleanup of SPARC, but the kernel will be essentially frozen.