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Sun vs. OpenBSD?
An anonymous reader writes "CNet has an article up about OpenBSD trying to get documentation for Sun's UltraSparc-III processor. Basically Sun is giving them a bit of run around....There is some documentation available for the processor, but not enough to get things to boot."
anyone who pays $$$ for modern Sun kit is an idiot if they want to run anything other than Solaris on it
I can't speak for everyone, but it seems that things are usually the other way around: Sun hardware is a great platform on which to run OpenBSD. It's not as if "I have this SPARC machine, what OS should I run on it?" Rather, it's more like "I would like to run OpenBSD, what is a good hardware platform to run OpenBSD?" The 32-bit SPARC port of OpenBSD happens to be very mature and stable, and SPARC hardware (especially sun4m) is bulletproof. Now that the OpenBSD sparc64 port is moving further along, the developers really need official documentation to make progress. But to the OpenBSD developers it seems that Sun is ignoring them. IMO I would give it some time, as Sun is a large corporation, and things take time. Especially if Sun did not already have corporate policy/plans for relations with OpenBSD.
-- Never hit a man with glasses. Hit him with a baseball bat.
The linux team apparently approached sun to show them the specs, Sun said "sign an NDA or no deal." Linux team signs, code goes under the GPL.
OpenBSD team approaches sun, Sun said "sign an NDA or no deal", OpenBSD says no, thats against the spirit of our project and the BSD license.
The interesting thing is that here the code is being used in an open source project (linux), but OpenBSD will not make use of it, because they respect the intent of the GPL.
Troll Like a Champion Today
Since you are an AC I'd say its close to 100% that Theo has done way more for the community than you have.
As for the specifics. If Sun made it policy that it required an NDA to get Sparc 3 Theo would go away. That makes Sparc 3 a closed architecture. But Sun claims Sparc 3 is open. All Theo is doing is either:
a) forcing the reality to match their rhetoric (i.e. open the spec)
b) forcing them change the rhetoric
Sun has been all over the map in terms of open source and open standards. I think these public battles are forcing Sun as an institution to confont the contradictions in their idealogy and corporate culture.
From the article:
University of Alberta's Bob Beck said he is forced to buy out-of-date UltraSparc II-based E450 servers instead of newer UltraSparc III-based V880 machines for the university's SunSITE software exchange.
This seems odd to me: 1) OpenBSD doesn't support SMP yet, right? 2) v880's must have multiples of 2 CPU's (up to 8).
Sunsite might be better off grabing some of those 1U v120's, throwing a dual channal diff scsi card in there, and using an a1000 array (or maybe a t3 array... with only 1 cpu you probably need the hardware raid these offer rather than the d1000's or a5200's). More disk, less rack space, less power.
Now, the v880's rock. Great price point, 8 cpu's, 2 FC-AL planes for a total of 12x73 gig disks, 10 PCI slots (2 x 64bit/66MHz), onboard gigabit fiber... the list goes on. It's a great box (for more details, hit up store.sun.com, select servers, find 'low end servers', and select the v880. And note that that's 'list price'. You can get up to a third off of it from most resellers)
For reference:
4x itanium 800MHz dell 7150: 8x73 gig disks is $61,113.00.
4x usIII 900 MHz sun v880, 6x 73 gig fcal disks is $59,995.00
(That's the closest 'apples to apples' match I could make. I chose itanium vs usIII because they're both true 64 bit chips. Though the expansion of the Dell isn't as nice... the sun can add 4 more proc's and 6 more disks. The dell can add more memory... 32gig tops the sun v880, and 64 gig the dell)
Zapman