Fedora for spark system

[James Wilkinson]

Naoki wrote:
> Not wanting to start anything here but..  wouldn't sparc be much more
> useful (wanted, widespread) than ia64? ;)

I suspect that the reason is finance...

I know Intel put a lot of money into ensuring IA64 software was
available and working well. I strongly suspect that Intel made it
worth-while for Red Hat to support RHEL on Itanium. (It's not unusual:
Windows NT 4 came on a CD with software for four processor families:
x86, PowerPC, Alpha and MIPS. All but x86 were dropped during the
lifespan of NT 4 when the owners of the chips stopped paying for the
support).

Clearly, if Intel and Red Hat have any agreement, it hasn't stopped Red
Hat from supporting Opteron or Power (or IBM's mainframes). But it has
kept the Itanium port alive. (I'd be surprised if IBM weren't helping
Red Hat with the S390 port).

I very much doubt that Solaris-loving Sun would want to fund Linux on
*Sparc, and I doubt that there are enough people who'd want to run RHEL
on *Sparc to provide enough revenue from sales. (These days, if you want
*Sparc, it's probably because you want to run Solaris-on-*Sparc, or for
embedded purposes).

Last I checked, both Fedora and RHEL were forked from the same Red Hat
"Rawhide" development tree.

James.

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