Slashdot Mirror
OpenBSD Requests UltraSPARC III Documentation
An anonymous submitter writes "OpenBSD wants to run on all hardware. They've asked Sun for documentation on the UltraSPARC III processors over and over, but been stonewalled. Theo recently asked users to talk to Sun about this issue. A fairly complete thread archive can be found here. The real kicker is that Sun has released this documentation through an NDA to Linux developers..."
try this: How can I guard my system against stack buffer overflow exploits?
R=read, W=write and X=execute. So, "per-page X bit protection" means the OS can specify for each memory page whether the bytes on that page can be executed as machine code. IA-32 has execute permissions for entire segments only, not for individual pages.
If you would have taken the time to read the messages from Theo in the thread, he says very clearly that they don't have enough documentation to write a kernel or an OS. Also, the type of documentation they need is nothing you can find on Sun's website.
...which finally has the SPARC V8 manual and the SPARC V9 manual online (online manuals appears to be what the original poster wanted), although they only seem to have the V9 manual online as compressed PostScript, not PDF. In the past, that documentation wasn't online; I heard a claim that it was due to copyright issues with whoever produced the printed versions (Addison-Wesley?).
See the SPARC Standards Documents Depository for the standards documents at sparc.org.
I think SunOS 5.0 came out earlier than that - early 90's?
More like "System V Release 3 extensions"; SVR4 didn't exist at the time. Actually, as of SunOS 3.2, a significant part of the userland code came from System V, and the fraction increased even more in 4.0.
Try "Solaris 2.0 and up", although the early versions of Solaris 2.x weren't all that popular, so maybe 2.5 was the first version that started being used a lot.
Actually, it's the OS component of Solaris that's called SunOS; this item in the Sun Computer Administration FAQ has the mappings for releases prior to Solaris 2.5 - the mapping continued along the lines you mention until Solaris 7, when they stopped pretending that Solaris 3 would come out any time soon and got rid of the leading "2.". There's also the window system and desktop component (OpenWindows, at least until they abandoned the OPEN LOOK desktop in favor of the Motif+CDE desktop that they're now abandoning in favor of GTK+GNOME).
"Solaris" was a marketoon idea; when the SVR4 project started, we figured it was just going to be "SunOS 5.0". I guess (I left Sun in 1988) they decided to come up with the "Solaris" name for the OS+window system stuff; they retroactively applied it to SunOS 4.x, but there had been 4.x releases previously - there were no 5.x releases before the "Solaris" name was introduced, so people didn't get used to the idea of "SunOS 5.x" to the same degree, and that plus the changeover to an SVR4-derived code base probably got people to think of "SunOS" as the BSD-based versions and "Solaris" as the SVR4-based versions.
Actually, the "HyperSPARC" name was Ross Technology/Cypress's marketoons idea, not Sun's marketoons idea; at the time, Sun were doing SuperSPARC, so I guess the Ross marketoons had to go one better.
Yeah, where do you go from there? "MegaSPARC"? "UltimoSPARC"? "CosmoSPARC"? "SuperHyperUltraHumongoSPARC"?