The developers of the Illumos project, which advances the kernel, network stack, file systems, drivers, libraries, and core set of system utilities of OpenSolaris, have decided to cease support for the 64-bit SPARC architecture. Among the architectures supported by Illumos, only x86_64 remains (support for the 32-bit x86 systems was discontinued in 2018). With the involvement of enthusiasts, there is a possibility to start implementing more modern architectures such as ARM and RISC-V in Illumos. The discontinuation of support for outdated SPARC systems will allow for cleaning up the codebase and remove SPARC-specific constraints.
Among the reasons for abandoning SPARC support is the lack of access to hardware for building and testing, making it impossible to ensure quality maintenance of the build using cross-compilation or emulators. There is also a desire to incorporate modern technologies into Illumos, such as JIT and the Rust programming language, whose advancement is hampered by ties to the SPARC architecture. Ceasing support for SPARC will also provide the opportunity to update the GCC compiler (currently, the project is forced to use GCC 4.4.4 to support SPARC) and to shift towards a newer standard for the C language.
Regarding the Rust programming language, developers intend to replace some programs in usr/src/tools, written in interpreted languages, with equivalents implemented in Rust. Additionally, there are plans to use Rust for developing kernel subsystems and libraries. Currently, the limited support for the SPARC architecture by the Rust project hinders the adoption of Rust in Illumos.
The discontinuation of SPARC support will not affect the current Illumos distributions OmniOS and OpenIndiana, which are released solely for x86_64 systems. Support for SPARC was present in the Illumos distributions Dilos, OpenSCXE, and Tribblix, of which the first two have not been updated for several years, while Tribblix abandoned updates for SPARC builds and switched to the x86_64 architecture in 2018.
Source: opennet.ru
