No Solaris 11 for Legacy UltraSPARC

I don’t do a lot of Solaris anymore, and though I’m interested in several of the new features in the upcoming Solaris 11, I wasn’t aware until today that it wouldn’t run on most legacy UltraSPARC systems:

Support for legacy systems that have included the UltraSPARC I, II, IIe, III, IIIi, III+, IV and IV+ processor architectures (as reported by the Solaris ‘psrinfo -pv’ command) has been removed. All Oracle SPARC Enterprise M-Series Servers and Oracle SPARC T-Series Servers will continue to be supported.

Source: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/systems/end-of-notices/eonsolaris11-392732.html

I’ve always liked the T-Series systems, and have personally achieved what I consider impressive workload consolidation using a few of them. It’s not entirely clear what Oracle means with the above statement, but rumor is that support for the sun4u architecture is gone. That’s a big change from the Solaris 11 Express HCL. I imagine there are lots of places where this means “we will never ever run Solaris 11.”

Reminds me of a certain fruit company. Time marches on.