Bailing on Solaris?

[Kvedulv / Michael Moll]

Hi,

On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 08:04:13PM -0500, Steven C. Peterson wrote:

> We currently run on Fujitsu Sparc 64-v based systems, PrimePower 650s,
> 850 and 2500 machines.

FreeBSD runs very well here on a Primepower 250 with two SPARC64-Vs
(1.35 GHz). I think I'm the only one(?) up to now with FreeBSD on such
CPUs, so this is a bit a shot in the dark:

I'm sure it will run as-is on 450s as these are quite the same as the
250. 650s and 850s are a little more different, but not really much. As
already recommended - just give it a try. Chances are that a recent
release will just work out of the box. If not, the required changes are
probably very small.

2500s are another category. I never touched one of these, but would
expect that more development is necessary to get these off the ground.

> Primarily these machines run large java web apps (tomcat) and
> databases (MySQL, and very little oracle)

MySQL is no problem, Oracle will not work - there's no Solaris syscall
translation like linuxulator.

Java is at the moment not available for sparc64, but there has been
some work in the past:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-sparc64/2009-December/006795.html
Back then there was almost no reaction, but a broader user base for
FreeBSD on sparc64 presumably would be helpful and could get things
going again.

Best Regards
-- 
Michael Moll