Red Hat has stopped official support for all its Linux releases for the Alpha and Sparc architectures, according to an official posting to the Bugtraq mailing lists.
Red Hat to Stop Support for Alpha, Sparc
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Didn’t microsoft support Alpha and Sparc at one time?
M$ Never supported SPARC, the original development platform of NT was (believe it or not) MIPS, then they added support for X86, Alpha and PPC. The rest is history…
I thought RH had dropped support for SPARC long ago
It might not surprise me if this were a reaction to Sun’s Linux distribution, which while if only for their PC line at present is effectively Red hat in new livery in any case. All the same, I can understand RH dropping Alpha but I am more surprised to see them drop SPARC – but they are a commercial company and if they see no market for it I guess there isn’t one.
ALPHA yes. SPARC no. ALPHA however was just recently discontinued. IIRC, it was discontinued at NT4 SP6a, correct me if I’m wrong.
Sun’s Linux distribution is for low end Intel servers and their new desktops. Not for SPARC machines, sorry to say. But frankly, why would anyone want to run Linux on a SPARC?
people run linux on a SPARC if they have an old system like a SPARCstation 2 with 40MHz cpu, where Solaris 2.6 crawls and they can’t get an older version of SunOS.
Debian does the job very well, better than SuSE or any other distro.
Yes MS did make a version of NT for SPARC. IIRC Intergraph briefly sold it for their SPARC based systems. Sun ended up purchasing exclusive rights to NT for SPARC so they could sit on it.
This is a good business move for Red Hat. Since Alpha has been discontinued, there’s no long term future for Red Hat in that. People do run Linux on SPARC, but I seriously doubt that Red Hat actually makes much money on it. Hobbiests that have SPARCs are going to use the download version, and no business that buys SPARC hardware is going to spend money to replace Solaris with SPARC Linux because they probably already have a support contract with Sun. So the SPARC and Alpha support was probably doing nothing more for Red Hat than taking development and testing resources away from the only platform they’re making money on – x86.
There is a port of RedHat 7.3 to the SPARC platform known as Aurora Linux. This distribution tries to be a direct port of 7.3 and follows all i386 errata fixes closely. Support comes from a active mail-list with most of the solutions to problems coming from the core developers. If you have a SPARC (or UltraSPARC) machine which could use an upgrade, this is worth the download.
http://www.auroralinux.org
Have the sun4c memory management in Linux been cleaned up yet? NetBSD did at least before run much faster than Linux on sun4c architecture machines such as the above mentioned SS2.
I thought Intergraph only considered SPARC for a brief time, and that no HW was ever produced (thus no NT version for it). Most of the guys from the clipper branch of Intergraph were hired by SUN though…
I know that NetBSD (what I’m running – on a x86!) has ports for SPARC hardware, and for Linux I think Debian has a SPARC flavor. (Debian supports a lot of architectures, probably because they take World Domination seriously. 😉 ) Out of curiosity, are there any other SPARC Linuxes besides Debian and the, mentioned on this forum, Aurora Linux?
There are several other SPARC Linuxes out there besides Debian and Aurora, such as Slackware, Gentoo and others. Check out http://www.ultralinux.org for more a more complete listing of the distros available.
I’ve tried Debian 3.0 and SuSE 7.3. No journaled file systems? Why not?
Thanks for the link to aurora above. That looks good.
NetBSD and OpenBSD for sparc are the same release as the intel versions. They work very well.
I wasn’t impressed with Linux on my sparc 20 🙁 but maybe I’ll try aurora
Yes I vote +++, in the long -run, i am supposed that whatelse linux companies want to support HARDware broadly will be failed in business. With a workforce around 700, (maybe more sofar) rhat is rather to focus on ITleading edge where linux proved a stable position in market. A very good and clean expaination as previous comments, no companies will buy a SPARC to install Linux anyway, if thay owned a old SPARC, they had contract with Sun.
my vote for this decision: *****
It is just a personal point, please let me know your points
cheers
Alpha is being discontinued not only by RedHat, but as seems also by Samsung, not to say HPaq
SPARC is another question, only hobbysts run SPARCLinux, there isn’t much space for making money.
OTOH, RedHat is softly going into the expanding Linux/PPC market. For now, only for IBM machines, but who knows?