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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?)
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