Karanbir Singh - Thinkability

Given the recent developments on the opensolaris front, there is again the issue of what OS do people run on their existing sparc hardware ? And I wonder if now is a good time to consider bringing up the CentOS on Sparc conversations again.

I have some hardware that can be used for the builds and I know there is enough contributed / contribute-able resources around to setup some development instances as well. However, the real issue is : is there much desire out there to have CentOS running on these machines ?

Even though I don't have any equipment in production running off Sparc anymore, I know there are quite a few people who do. And it looks like Oracle wants to put these people in a position where they either run a paid for supported Solaris or nothing at all. If we can do something to create an option, that would be awesome. And given the huge commitment to open source that the CentOS upstream has, doing it here on this platform makes the most sense since efforts put in will stay in an open source model, with equal opportunity for anyone to join the effort and continue it. Knowing that there is no vendor preferences or vendor isolation / ownership issues being involved.

CentOS also makes for a good choice since the porting and development effort would need to only really be done at one point - when a major new release is announced upstream - and from that point on, its a case of maintaining the builds for the lifespan. Considering that the lifespan for a CentOS release would be 7 years or more, it makes the effort even more worthwhile.

Usual suspects still hold true : long life, stable releases, documentation that is shared with the i386/x86_64 world for most parts, userspace support in the regular media, a clueful community and an awesome infrastructure setup etc.

Maybe we can sync up with the Fedora-sparc guys and see if there is any synergy there. I know that they have been getting ready for a new release soon.

Something to think about.

- KB