Re: New Solaris CBE release available

Hi Alan,

first of all, thanks a lot for providing another CBE release within such a =
short
interval after the last one! I have already updated Debian's SPARC servers =
without
any issues.

Being able to run a recent version of Solaris puts peace to the mind as we =
don't
have to worry about potential unfixed CVEs. Plus, there are users who have =
reported
issues with the previous CBE release on their SPARC S7, so I hope that issu=
e will now
be fixed as well.

So, huge thanks to you and your colleagues for making this possible!

On Fri, 2026-03-06 at 17:27 -0800, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
> On 3/6/26 13:46, Peter Tribble wrote:
> >=20
> > Given the huge amount of effort they've put in to fix Y2038 issues, I w=
ould go=20
> > for coincidence.
> > (And I imagine the support lifetime isn't set by engineering.)
>=20
> We do have some input to it, and have paid attention to the 2038 issue wh=
en
> providing our input, but the current dates are indeed set by customer dem=
and,
> and there are limits to how far forward we can reliably forecast that on =
the
> business side.

I think that date was also pushed into the future already, wasn't it? I thi=
nk the
original plan foresaw the end of the service life in 2034, didn't it?

> We are assuming that even if all our support contracts are finished by th=
e end
> of 2037 that some customers will want to keep running the software past t=
hat,
> based on our experience with customers popping up to ask about SunOS 4 or
> Solaris 2.6 many years after their support lifetimes ended, and have been
> working for more than a decade now to make that possible, though we're no=
t
> 100% complete yet.

That makes me smile though. I have heard similar stories from other softwar=
e vendors,
including my employer. It's surprising what kind of old systems people are =
still using
in production.

> For instance, this CBE release makes the snoop command and the underlying=
 bufmod
> streams module it uses become Y2038 safe (but broken instead in 2106, as =
explained
> under "Enhancements for Developers" in
> https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/whats-new-in-oracle-solaris-11-4-sru-90 =
.)
>=20
> I gave some further explanation/examples on Mastodon last year:
> https://hachyderm.io/@alanc/114519310064497360
> https://hachyderm.io/@alanc/114519356149693816

Thanks for the links. Definitely interested in such reads.

Btw, there are some open-source projects involving SPARC that Oracle previo=
usly worked
on but that never got upstreamed. For example, there is an incomplete port =
of libunwind
to SPARC [1] that I extracted from the Oracle Linux 6 sources. I would love=
 to get these
upstreamed and have been trying to reach out to Oracle engineers to make th=
is happen. If
you have the possibility to talk to some people, that would be great.

Adrian

--=20
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer
`. `'   Physicist
  `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913