While SPARC may no longer be supported by the main Illumos project, it still works and is still viable. This page brings together a variety of information regarding Illumos on SPARC, not necessarily limited to Tribblix.
↫ Tribblix website
It seems running Tribblix – and other Illumos-based distributions – on SPARC is still possible, but there are some serious limitations anyone who has tried to use even slightly older operating systems will be fairly familiar with. For instance, since there’s no Rust for Illumos on SPARC, Firefox and other applications that use it are not available, and Tribblix in particular no longer builds Pale Moon (or LibreOffice). Rust is available on Solaris 11, though, so it may be possible to bring it to Illumos. In a similar vein, Go also isn’t available for SPARC either.
As far as hardware support goes, it’s a bit of a mixed bag, as systems that should work do, in fact, not, and even systems that do work run into a very familiar problem: graphics card support is a big issue. This is a problem plaguing X.org on any outdated or sidelined architecture, and it seems Illumos is also affected. Obviously, this greatly reduces the usefulness of Illumos on workstations, but is less of an issue on servers. You’ll run into the same problem when trying to run NetBSD, OpenBSD, or Linux in, say, PA-RISC hardware.
Of course, the problem is both a lack of people interested in and capable of contributing to keeping stuff running on older architectures, further spurred on by a dwindling supply of hardware available at reasonable prices. Sad, but there isn’t much that can be done about it.
A friend is using sparc64 hardware as a primary desktop (in 2025!) and we’ve been able to build firefox by pregenrating build artefacts. For reasons that are beyond me, Firefox uses NodeJS (another browser’s JavaScript engine) during build, which turned out to be quite problematic.
I hear solaris 11 also has the latest version. I’d like to know which oracle customers are paying for that…
> For instance, since there’s no Rust for SPARC
This is wrong, speaking as the SPARC V8 bare metal Rust target maintainer. (There’s also a SPARC for Linux target and a SPARC for Solaris target). There’s no native host toolchain shipping officially but only because no one has proposed one – there’s no real reason it wouldn’t work and there are apparently unofficial builds.
See https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/rustc/platform-support/
All of the OS’s still maintained on SPARC have Rust for SPARC packages which includes OpenBSD, NetBSD, Linux and Solaris.
Viable is an understatement. The Fujitsu M12 is still being sold, and power to performance ratio is excellent. SPARC64 XII cpus have some interesing features that make them highly performant in some areas.
Yes yes, they are not cheap and could never be used for a consumer system realisticly. But imagine a SPARC world instead of an intel one, the performance savings was enormous in the 90s and in the 80s mostly laughed at the idea of reducing instructions. Today almost every CPU on the planet is more or less RISC with caveats. To find a true CISC cpu today that is still made, you have to go into the specialized market or perhaps embedded chips.
And the concept whislt true in idea and MIT did some tremendous work, the head designer said “And “RISC” CPUs aren’t RISC either anymore. Over the years they picked up so many instructions that they ended up with more instructions than the “CISC” processors were were originally competing with.”