Something has come over me, and I’ve decided that I should get back into operating systems. In high school, this was all I wanted to work on: particularly building the systems to make people’s lives easier. But reasons brought me into system administration, and there has never been an absence of work of be done.

Since then, the hardware platforms for computers collapsed, with Apple and Sun both appearing to move to the x86 lineage of ISAs. Commercially supported Unix workstations went away, leaving only Linux and macOS.

But Raspberry Pi, Apple M1 and Ampere Altra systems are making really insteresting products at every range of general purpose computer, all running ARM aarch64. And RISC-V is getting momentum as well.

So I’m starting to explore illumos support for ARM today, and want to get it to the point where it’s my standard system.

Hopefully, there will be more updated to come.