Sparc64 doesn't care about you, and you shouldn't care about Sparc64

[Warner Losh]

> On Nov 4, 2015, at 12:12 PM, Sean Bruno <sbruno at freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
> So here's the thing, Sparc64 is *just* barely alive in FreeBSD.

Has anybody actually booted it off a newish tree?

> There is exactly 1 Sparc64 machine as a ref box being hosted at Yahoo
> for the project.  No new hardware is on the horizon.  None of the newer
> Sparc64 processors have been tested to work on FreeBSD and nobody is
> clamoring to get them working.
> 
> We're moving into a post-gcc base system now, and sparc64 is the obvious
> "odd arch" here.  There's activity to get MIPS moved to clang and active
> work to get powerpc moved fully to clang.  Leaving Sparc64 in base,
> requires someone to either make clang DTRT or keep gcc 4.2.1-ish alive.

There was some work to get clang to do the right thing for sparc64. Last
I heard, the tree compiles with it. It didn’t boot, but at the time gcc-compiled
kernels didn’t boot either. I’m not sure how this status has moved through time.
It would be best to ask Marius Strobl, since he’s the only one committing
to sparc64 sub-tree lately non-global-sweep cleanups.

Here’s a breakdown of commits in different parts of sys. The ‘Marius’ column
is for commits Marius has made in sparc64 only. The rest are the different
architectures we currently support. I wrote this with mail.app, so formatting
may be dicy.

Year		Marius	sparc64	mips	arm		powerpc	i386		amd64	x86	arm64
2015	5		32		164		445		144		168		247		109	168
2014	0		39		117		672		98		125		296		108	-
2013	14		65		235		455		217		142		235		67	-
2012	24		55		272		343		152		188		221		76	-
2011	78		131		205		105		172		189		182		56	-
2010	75		127		501		103		211		274		268		75	-
2009 	58		95		269		193		137		293		258		-	-
2008	65		109		65		167		161		304		222		-	-

sparc64 rate of change has fallen way off since 2011, both in terms of the
number of commits, as well as the share of commits relative to other
platforms. While I know that not all commits are treated equally, and that
different commit styles in different parts of the tree may skew things,

> I have asked around for help getting the Sparc64 qemu-bsd-user binary
> working so I could at a minimum build packages, and I have gotten no
> feedback from folks.  So the only option here is to resurrect sparc64
> machines somewhere and start up builds on real hardware.
> 
> Let's just call it what it is, a dead end of the technology tree.
> I move that we do NOT produce 11.0 versions for Sparc64 and it should be
> dropped from the tree.

I concur.  I think sparc64 has had a nice run, but it’s time to recognize
that the run is nearing its end.

Warner

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 842 bytes
Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail
URL: <http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-arch/attachments/20151104/2d4932b4/attachment.bin>