The feature freeze point for Ubuntu 10.10 is starting to give up SPARC architecture

One feature of the http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/13835.html ">ubuntu release is that there are many versions that support different application areas and hardware architectures, but Sun SPARC, which is too far away from the average user, Intel IA64 (Itanium) is being discarded. The level of use and maintenance of the Ubuntu SPARC transplant has been severely degraded, and its quality is lower than the minimum required for the Ubuntu porting version.

SPARC, known as the Extensible Processor Architecture (Scalable Processor architecture), is one of the RISC microprocessor architectures. It was first designed by the sun-Yang computer in 1985 and is one of the registered trademarks of SPARC International Inc. The company was established in 1989 to promote SPARC to the outside world and to conduct a compliance test for the architecture. In addition, in order to broaden the SPARC-designed ecosystem, SPARC International also opened the standard and authorized a number of manufacturers to adopt, including Texas Instruments, Cypress Semiconductors, Fujitsu and so on. Since the SPARC architecture is also fully open, the Leon processor, which is fully open to the original code, is written in VHDL and is licensed by LGPL.

The latest Ubuntu developer Summit discussed this and, with the approval of the Ubuntu Technical Committee, decided to drop the SPARC schema version of the porting effort from the feature freeze point developed by Ubuntu 10.10.

If Ubuntu users and developers want this portable version to continue, they should stand up for maintenance and improve their quality to an acceptable level, which requires a lot of work in the system kernel and tool chain.

The Ubuntu IA64 transplant version is much better, with the system kernel and tool chain better than the SPARC version, but there is no active maintenance team. The Ubuntu Technical Committee says it understands the benefits of keeping the IA64 transplant, but the lack of an active maintenance team will surely lead to a decline in quality, so that if there is no maintenance team to come forward, it can only be reluctantly.

For 64-bit UltraSPARC III processors, Sun has 3 main series. The first is the scalable S-series, which is mainly used in high-performance, easily scalable multiprocessor systems. At present, the frequency of UltraSPARC IIIs has reached 750MHz. There are ultrasparcⅳs and Ultrasparcⅴs and other models. The frequency of the ultrasparcⅳs is 1ghz,ultrasparcⅴs 1.5GHz. The second is the integrated I series, which integrates a variety of system functions into one processor, providing a higher benefit for a single-processor system. The frequency of the UltraSPARC III I has been introduced to 700MHz, and the future ultrasparcⅳi will reach 1GHz.

The SPARC architecture was originally designed for workstation use and later applied to large SMP servers manufactured by Sun, Fujitsu, etc. The Solaris operating system is also one of the SPARC-designed systems, and in addition to Solaris, the NeXTSTEP, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD systems also offer SPARC versions.

Currently the latest version of SPARC is 8th and 9th, and in December 2005, the UltraSPARC announced that its T1 processor will be open source. April 12, 2006, the computer announced the full UltraSPARC T2 processor has been trial-run.