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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
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.
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
...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"?