Sparc Emulator?
Previous efforts have been, well, how can I put it, sluggish?
Oracle looks like it's going to suggest Solaris users move to its SPARC-powered cloud. Ever since Oracle quietly announced it would not deliver any more point-zero upgrades to its Solaris operating system and instead move to continuous delivery, The Register has wondered exactly what Big Red plans to deliver, and when. Our …
This is rather interesting, as a fully functioning SPARC emulator was available for a few years some time back from a company called Transitive. This was an offshoot of Manchester University. IBM bought them up and they disappeared from sight, although it was probably used for the x86 on Power offering for Power servers....PowerVM Lx86.
A good question. Given that Oracle doesn't really truly 'build' anything. It's all got through acquisition or getting someone else to do the graft. Would Oracle create their own emulator? I doubt it. So, where have they got it from. I know the Transitive software was supposed to be impressively fast and had some special IP which aided this. Otherwise, I do wonder how well an interpreted Sparc would run on a X86 server.
Oracle doesn't really truly 'build' anything? Are you serious? Have you seen Oracles Engineered Systems product line (Exadata, Exalogic, Exalytics, Oracle Database Appliance, MiniCluster, SuperCluster, ZDLRA, etc) and the last 6 SPARC processors (SPARC T4/SPARC T5/SPARC M5/SPARC M6/SPARC M7/SPARC S7) that were 100% designed and developed by Oracle?
I was at Sun in the Enterprise Server Hardware group and we did not have any engineered systems. Just Servers and Storage plus networking bits. Oracle, after acquiring Sun, hired well over a 1,000 more HW engineers which then took on the Engineered Systems developments which Oracle had originally started with HP with the very first Exadata. So the Oracle Engineered Systems are 100% Oracle designed/developed/engineered. Sure there are many Ex-Sun employees that are/have worked on the Engineered Systems but it all started after joining Oracle like myself.
We've fired everyone working on Solaris, but never mind. Sign on the dotted line in blood, Larry needs a new yacht.
"No question is too hard, no answer is too technical." - We've got a LAN cable, no WiFi drops in the conference hall are going to stop us from Googling your question... just for you.
"Learn how easy it is to move your Oracle Solaris–based workloads to … Oracle SPARC–based cloud solutions"... running Linux.
Per this post on LinkedIn over the weekend, Solaris is pretty much dead.
RIP Solaris: Oracle laid off nearly all Solaris technical staff on Friday 9/1.
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6310502328470433792/?commentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Acomment%3A(activity%3A6310502328470433792%2C6310832265488330752)
"Yes there were layoffs but no, theres still a lot of Solaris engineers! "
Heh. I happened to look at the "Oracle Solaris Engineering Panel" description yesterday, and it had three people listed as speakers, because, you know: panel.
Today it has one.
"Come join us for a fun session and be sure to embrace your inner geek!"
LOL. Those 400 will probably get whittled again and you know they are only there to sustain Solaris.
Assuming you are still at Oracle, just take a look at who they let go and tell me things are still rosy. Face it: it's over.
You can see where Oracle are going with this: get customers off running SPARC/Solaris on prem ASAP. So dangle a cloudy carrot in front of a CFO and get those prem servers moved first. Maybe a sweet licensing deal ("Look! it's only pennies per core!")
Then do the old switcheroo where the SPARC servers in Oracle's cloud are swapped out for x86 and an emulator. (That old licensing agreement plus the sudden need for many more cores for the same job may be a cash windfall for Oracle, but I couldn't possibly comment.)
Then let gravity take over as the customers run headlong towards Linux.
Hate to see it happen, but it's going to happen.
SPARC and Solaris are in every Oracle Public Cloud datacenter around the world being sold as a service and Oracle offers SPARC core subscriptions at the exact same price as its x86 cores. $100/OCPU/Month. https://cloud.oracle.com/en_US/compute-opc/dedicatedsparc/pricing
SPARC has been around over 30 years and there are over 5M SPARC cores in production today so its highly unlikely that SPARC whether from Oracle or Fujitsu will die anytime soon.
The Solaris vs Linux today looks very much like the OS2 vs Windows issue when OS2 was new. One is vastly better on very high end equipment with better features but the alternates are better running on generic machines. I use ZFS on both Solaris and FreeBSD and the Solaris version has more features and seems to be better optimized. I would love to have some of the new SPARC hardware but the base model cost more than a new car and my work load just doesn't require that much power.