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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..."
When will they port it to my bandsaw?
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
I think there are some times when Theo's style is dead on, like with the ipf filter. However, in this case it may not be the most constructive way to effect a change.
I have just read Theo's pledge to users and looks like there is a person's name listed who appears to be a sole decision maker on this issue.
;-)
I wonder how many phone calls it would take for him to get it
Maybe if the OpenBSD guys could get SMP working or something, someone might take them seriouesly
someone like sun?
openssh, created by the openbsd project, is a standard part of solaris 9. gripe about smp all you want - i would prefer they focus on security and crypto - but your bias isn't applicable on this point.
while sun should provide this kind of documentation anyway, it's absurd that they don't provide it to the very people that freely provided them with tools they have rebadged as their own (sunssh) and tout as a feature.
Even Sun knows where the future lies.
Yeah, in the buzzword bandwagon. Linux is good press. People will write article about Sun moving to Linux. But no one outside of a small community has even heard of BSD. It won't play well in the press. Since Sun is a publicly traded company, they NEED good and constant press. Since Linux is the current tech media darling, it only makes sense to latch on to Linux.
I'd rather have the OpenBSD guys auditing linux code instead
I wish SOMEONE would audit the Linux code. And I wish someone would audit the GNU code that typically surrounds it. But OpenBSD is a separate project. There are at least ten times as many Linux developers as OpenBSD developers. Surely one or two of them are capable of auditing their own project.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
o/~ Join us now and share the software
What about this thing?
What else would you need to port a kernel to it? It descibes about everything you want to know about the UltraSparc
Before you email me, remember: "There is no god!"
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=openbsd-misc&m=103 830199306037&w=2
> I'm sorry you don't yet believe that we are striving to be a traditional
> company that works well with the Open Source community. Most of our
> efforts to date have been in the software arena, and I think some of
> what you ran into was the trailing edge of Open Source awareness (in the
> hardware business).
The other contributions from Sun are entirely irrelevant.
I don't care about Jinu, Jxta, Jboring, Jawn, or any of that
stuff.
I care about running on ultrasparc III.
What does Sun have to with BeOS?
Why not fork?
Does trying to get Linux press forbid Sun from releasing the code to OpenBSD? Isn't it possible to send it to both parties?
Last I checked, supporting Linux doesn't null and void also supporting BSD.
Sun borrowing OpenSSH is one thing, but Sun giving hardware docs to OpenBSD is another. Perhaps Sun is afraid their hardware support would not be safe with the BSD license. That would be ironic.
cpeterso
it's absurd that they don't provide it to the veyr people that freely provided them with tools that they have rebadged as their own (sunssh) and tout as a feature
Okay, it may not be a good idea for Sun, but I don't see why people are bashing Sun for it.
First, the OpenBSD people choose to release openssh under a BSD license. Sorry, but you *cannot* "expect" anything in return, not even morally (IMHO) -- the BSD license is not a "nicer sounding" closed license. Sun isn't obliged to do jack in return, any more than the BSD people are obliged to do jack in return for Sun donating personnel and resources to the GNOME Usability Project.
Second, Sun makes their money from hardware, not from selling Solaris. This is much more of an issue to Sun than the OpenBSD people. I can't understand why the OpenBSD people even care -- if Sun doesn't want the OBSD people to further increase the value of Sun hardware, that's a Sun issue, not an OBSD issue. Leave it.
Third, this article was fairly obviously designed to start a *BSD-Linux flamefest ("But those bad ol' Linux developers, *they* got the documentation"). I'd just ignore falling into the trap the article author laid for you, Slashdot posters.
May we never see th
Nah. Releasing that same information to OpenBSD might make some Linux people think Sun was two-timing on them. There's nothing worse than a Linux kernel developer scorned...
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Troll and Flamebait moderations from the peanut gallery. Is anybody metamodding this crap? If you don't agree, post, don't abuse your mod provs. Everything above is either dead-on fact, or my arguably relevant opinion. It's not a troll, and it's not flamebait.
11*43+456^2
Please provide link to free Solaris source download. ;-)
Try NetBSD... safe,straightforward,useful.
Sorry, in the mid 90's Sun switched from BSD with System VR4 extensions (a.k.a. SunOS) to a microthreaded System V R4 with BSD extensions (Solaris 2.5 & up). Of course, Solaris 2.5, 2.6, 7 and 8 are also called SunOS 5.5, 5.6, 5.7 (which is also Solaris 2.7), and 5.8 (which is also Solaris 2.8). Gotta love the way Sun's marketing power adds that zing by skipping version numbers. And they also do it with hardware, the Sparc 3 actually sold as the Sparc 5, and then the Sparc 4 introduced after the 5 (which should have been 3) And the marketing department ran out of steam after having Sparc, Hypersparc, and Ultrasparc and couldn't think of any more names so they just then went UltraSparc II, IIi, III
*pop* the overfed BSD troll explodes and gooey troll glop drips from the ceiling - wasn't that fun!
No, I don't know where to send it. Honestly I can't believe you're still hung up on it. Hurry up a post soe identifying info then jerkoff.
11*43+456^2
I think what he means is that there's nothing worse than a Linux kernel developer. Whether or not he is scorned is largely unimportant...
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
Um... wouldn't looking at the code for something that isn't released under the BSD license taint any developer who plans to release code under the BSDL? I mean, once they look at the code, they wouldn't be allowed to include it in OpenBSD. Unless, of course, they had one team of people reading the code and writing documentation for it, and another team taking that documentation and coding on their own. If I recall correctly, that's how Compaq had to do it to reproduce IBM's BIOS.
I can see it being against a lot of rules to just look at the source to other projects and then writing your own. Especially if you plan to use a different license.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
When yahoo adopted FreeBSD, they had no SMP support. For quite some time, Linux didn't have SMP support. SMP is more a buzzword than feature. It is incredibly rare that users ever need SMP at all. When someone needs it, there is nothing stopping them from adding it, or employing one of the current OpenBSD developers to add it.
You know, the OpenBSD developers don't agree with you, and the large group of OpenBSD users don't agree with you.
Just because Linux is the buzzword of the day, doesn't mean there is anything wrong with any other systems. BSD has been around long before Linux was first concieved, and it will be around long after the media forgets about Linux.
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First of all, wow. You need to calm down a little bit. Second, it seems rather immoral to me that they would be allowed to do that. I wouldn't do that.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
I'm a user, and I need SMP. Why? Here's why:
When Netscape or Mozilla or IE barfs on some lame Shockwave applet, and hogs 100% CPU. I have another CPU usable to kill off the bad app.
I want to rip CDs, play Oggs, and start a bloated MS app all at the same time without making a coaster, or hearing skip on my Oggs.
I want my system (Win32 or Linux/X) to respond smoothly and gracefully to spikes in load.
I NEED SMP. I would not use an OS without it. I BOUGHT an SMP box just for the above reasons. Once you go dually, there's no going back.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
OK, I'm karma capped, lets some good ol' flaming start...
Theo de Raadt: (calls up Sun) Hello, I demand some documentation.
Sun Guy: Who the f*** are you?
TdR: I'm Theo de Raadt.
SG: Which Theo de Raadt?
TdR: The one that is incredibly smart and productive and gets real pissy when I don't get my way; the one that forked OpenBSD because the NetBSD folks didn't like how pissy I got and drove users away.
SG: Oh that one. What documentation do you demand because you somehow infer a right to having?
TdR: On the UltraSparc III processor.
SG: Oh, the one that you spent no R & D money on, that you spent no manufacturing money on, but you feel you have an absolute right to have it and if you don't get it you get pissy?
TdR: Yeah, thats the one.
SG: OK, here is our link.
TdR: This isn't enough. I want more.
SG: What other documentation are you demanding?
TdR: I don't know. It is your job to figure out what documentation I don't have and to get it to me when I demand it.
SG: If you don't even know what to ask for, how are you demanding more?
TdR: Those other guys get more.
SG: Which guys?
TdR: The Linux guys.
SG: You mean the ones that we kind of work with because we have an Intel distro and we should really appease the guys that kind of put it together?
TdR: Yeah, I want what they have. I deserve it.
SG: Why?
TdR: Because I want it to make a server.
SG: Using what OS?
TdR: A free one, that will put no money in your pocket for OS licenses, no money for support, that will most likely not sell any Sun software because it usually runs as a fairly stripped down firewall box, and won't even sell any of your real expensive hardware where you make the real money from since we don't support SMP. Since you lost a lot of money when the dot-com bubble burst, and your stock is now close to historic lows and have had a couple rounds of layoffs, you must be real enthused about doing some work which probably won't get your company any money at all?
SG: Ahh, so you demand we get some internal engineers for you who luckily will be really eager to stop their real work fending off fierce competition from IBM Windows HP and Linux, gather all our UltraSparc-III stuff for you, run it through our lawyers who luckily enough will drop all work involving our lawsuits about Microsoft and Java (and possible shareholder and wrongful termination lawsuits) sanitize it for you because from your reputation for getting pissy over things (witness ipf) you won't take kindly to an NDA and rush it to you on your schedule not ours.
TdR: If you don't, I'll get pissy. Yes, and make sure you get that NDA stuff out. We're opensource, and we don't like NDAs, and since we're always right your NDAs should go away because we say so.
I know why Theo would want this, but I can't see the Sun guys dropping everything and making this their number one priority. Though childish, if I was a Sun person, I'd release this stuff first to FreeBSD and NetBSD, knowing it would eventually trickle down to OpenBSD, just to piss off Theo.
openbsd outperforming solaris on a sparc machine? last time i tried openbsd (2.8) that was exactly the opposite of what happened, it was far less performant than solaris, and crashed several times.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Sparc is a pretty open architecture, see www.sparc.org, sun arent the only sources of information, fujitsu produce sparc based machines too
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
...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"?
And that's different from Linux how? Sure, you have to release changes to linked source, but there's plenty of other ways to make GPL'd software propritary without breaking the GPL. Just look at Microsoft's Unix compatibility package... It uses GPL'd code. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/sfu/
If you think the GPL forces anything to be open, you are just lying to yourself. If anything, the GPL just makes things more difficult for those not trying to completely rip off the source.
If you think GPL'd software hurts Microsoft, or even prevents them from using it in their own products, you are completely wrong. You'd be FAR better off using a BSD license with a clause that says it may not be used by Microsoft in any way...
As you said, Open Source is without actual communism. That means, someone using BSD-licensed code doesn't take anything away from the author. Why do you think I'd be hurt if the software I release makes someone's Mac OS X box more secure?
The GPL trying to force the release of modified software just hurts it's own popularity for the sake of pushing RMS's ideals upon the world like a virus. Just look at what standards have sprung up... TCP/IP, IPSec, NFS, Kerberos, LPD, SSH, etc. All of which had viable, BSD-licensed implimentations. If you think the GPL'd CUPS is going to catch on, you're dead wrong. Now, if it was under the BSD, you might see network printers supporting whatever protocol CUPS uses. The GPL
actually keeps the software restricted, guaranteeing it will never catch on outside of a few Linux users. In the mean time, just about every BSD-licensed advancement has become adopted far and wide.
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