14 DAY TRIAL // Gentoo's Yury German is informing the community of the Linux-based operating system via a mailing list announcement that the Gentoo security team will no longer support the SPARC architecture.
The developer reveals the fact that the decision to drop SPARC as a security supported hardware architecture by the Gentoo security team was made after a long discussion with the SPARC team and other Gentoo developers involved in maintaining SPARC as a supported Arch for the GNU/Linux distribution.
"This decision follows the Council decision on 2016-12-11, 'The Council defers to the security team, but is supportive of dropping security support for sparc if it is unable to generally meet the security team timelines'," says Yury German, Gentoo Security Team Lead, in the mailing list announcement.
x86, amd64, Alpha, HPPA, PPC, and PPC64 remain supported
With SPARC removed from the list of security supported hardware architectures, the Gentoo Linux project announces that the remaining supported architectures are x86, amd64, Alpha, HPPA, PPC (PowerPC), and PPC64 (64-bit PowerPC). The updated list of supported hardware architectures by Gentoo Linux can always be found at Gentoo Vulnerability Treatment Policy (GVTP).
At the moment of writing this article, the GVTP document currently lists SPARC as a supported architecture for installing Gentoo Linux, but Yury German has said that a Gentoo Linux Security Advisories (GLSA) will be released before a certain package version is necessarily stable for the architecture. Gentoo Vulnerability Treatment Policy should soon be updated to list SPARC as an unsupported architecture.
Additionally, those already running Gentoo Linux on the SPARC architecture will be informed about the end of life support via an updated glsa-check, which will present them with the necessary information. Because most of the Gentoo Linux security issues are cross-architecture, glsa-check will continue to be operational on SPARC systems.