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Solaris Coming to IBM's Power Architecture?
johnm writes "Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's pony-tailed number two, dropped this little snippit in his blog where he talks extensively about what he thinks 'open' means: 'For example, as we continue porting Solaris onto IBM's Power architecture (demo coming soon!)...' Does this mean you'll soon be able to ditch OS X and stick on Solaris 10 onto Macs?" While coming off as an ad for Java, Schwartz also raises some valid points about Unix and migration.
POWER == PowerPC, but PowerPC != POWER
POWER is a superset of PowerPC. See here.
GPL Deconstructed
Who cares about running Solaris on the Mac G5, look at IBM's efforts to convert Solaris/Sun shops over to AIX/RS6k shops! If you browse IBM's page looking at the pSeries servers (the Power series) you will notice ads about migrating from Solaris to AIX. This is a big inititive at IBM.
... Solaris on the pSeries boxes would definitly be interesting. I believe IBM rebadges quite a bit of commoditiy hardware and marks the price up 900% (Older advanced 3d graphics cards for RS6000s were $30 s3 cards with different PCI identification tags and such)... so it might be easy to pick up support for quite a bit of the peripheral hardware from the Linux world.
From our standpoint, it's goes a bit like "ewww AIX"
I'm not sure I'd shove it into a production environment, and what if IBM starts to throw curveballs into the works to thwart the people running Solaris. Still totally funny if you ask my opinion. Talk about a comeback to IBM's marketing strategy, but at what cost to Sun's hardware sales.
Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
WinNT wasn't so much "ported" to PPC as PPC was one of the architectures it originally supported. (Along with x86, of course, Alpha - the world's first 64-bit PC was in 1993, not 2003! - and, if my memory serves without looking at my NT4WKS CD, MIPS?)
And they are meaningless.
There are two application of the 'open' term in Informatics.
Open systems conform to open standards. Solaris is an open operating system.
Open source, well, you know, Solaris ain't an open source OS.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
With Oracle now running on OS X, and the fact that masses of Enterprise Application vendors use Java, that argument is dwindling away--as any enterprise app written using J2EE will run on OS X just fine.
Not.
When one talks a microkernel, that's not a complete kernel. It is the basics of a kernel, one needs to add servers to that in order to get an OS kernel.
In Mac OS X, there is only one server: BSD. And it is mixed in a monolithic kernel with Mach.
Contrast that with the Hurd which has Mach (or L4) plus several servers, or the other BSDs that have no microkernels.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
Sort of. Windows NT origionally was written for the i860, which was abandoned. The first release (3.1) ran on x86, mips, and alpha. the 3.5 release ran on powerpc. FYI
"Haven't you heard of this one running OSX on 2200 processors"
The Virginia Tech cluster isn't a machine, it's a pile of PCs communicating via MPI, like any other Beowulf cluster. What the previous poster meant was OS support for SMP... CPUs in one box handled by one instance of the OS. I'd be more than happy to see a 4 or 16 CPU Apple, but there ain't one. Anyway, as others have said, I think this Solaris ploy is aimed at IBM RS/6000 boxes, not Macs.
Luke, help me take this mask off
They already have. Broadcom NIC's already exist in Sun servers (I have one, a v240).
Scalable to > 100 processors out-of-the-box. I don't need some tricked out kernel build from the folks building special 512-processor Linux machines.
Compatibility with 64-bit apps written 10 years ago.
A decent threading model that has been in place for years. Last time I checked there were 2 competing proposals for a new Linux threading system
CC-NUMA memory allocation.
Hot-swappable CPUs and consolidation. I can dynamically split single Solaris instance, running on 128 processors, to N instances each running on 128/N processors.
Mature user/kernel profiling tools.
Stable device driver model. Drivers from Solaris 2.6 will work fine in Solaris 10. Meanwhile any Linux kernel patch that changes task_struct will require rebuilds of certain Linux device drivers. Yes...not a problem with all open-source drivers, but the world isn't all open-source (ask nVidia)
The kernel is more modular. I can swap in a different scheduler.
Trusted Solaris is available if needed
What you're watching is the flailing of a company that knows its old buisness is doomed.
.
The RISC performance crown is POWER. The price-performance crown is x86. SPARC is stuck in a market slice between these two, and is getting squeezed. And SPARC is unlikely to be able to invade the x86-and-PPC-dominated desktop market, which means its development will always have fewer resources behind it than the squeezers. There's life left in the SPARC platform, but the way the wind is blowing is clear.
So what to do? Well, Sun's trying lots of things, hoping one sticks. If SPARC is in trouble, maybe Solaris can become the universal high-end Unix, running on any machine (that is, x86 and POWER). Maybe the Java Desktop System can secure Sun a slice of the Linux pie, even if Linux (backed by IBM) improves until leaves no room for Solaris. Maybe Java can save the company. Maybe if Sun open-sources key products, it can get the benefits of open development and still be the company people turn to for commercial support of them. Maybe . .
Who knows? Maybe something will work. It's worth a shot, at least.