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.

Comments

not really

[Anonymous Coward]

porting an OS is more than adding support for a CPU architecture. hardware drivers, for example...

Power != PowerPC

[genericacct]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think PowerPC is code compatible with IBM POWER RISC. They are similar, but PowerPC was a joint project with Motorola.

Open is open

[gtrubetskoy]

Only a customer can define the word "open." That's my view.

To me "open" simply means you can figure out what happens, "customer" has nothing to do with it. When I wrote mod_python I did not think of myself as a vendor and I don't think of mod_python users as "customers". You can't just think of everything in terms of "business", it's not like that at all.

Re:Why Solaris ?

[dgatwood]

I can only think of one: unified development and deployment environment. If you're deploying on some Sun box with a bunch of CPUs, it would be nice to be able to run the same OS on both platforms. Admittedly, you could do the same with Linux, though it may not scale as well to the multiple CPUs on the Sun. At least that used to be the case....

Sun == erratic

[hot_Karls_bad_cavern]

Wow. What are they doing over there? Let me preface this by saying i work with solaris daily, i like solaris (love/hate, you know what i mean if you use it), and well, the ultras i have in the house just will not die (not for my lack of trying though).

However, after all these "sorta" announcements from different heads of the crew, i'm getting uneasy about Sun. Java open/closed/free/not-free/for-the-love-of-pete-whi ch-jre-j2se-jrs94x-should i get? Solaris open/closed/free/sorta/java-desktop? Heh, okay just poking fun there, but seriously, do they not seem a little like their top guys don't talk all that much and just make random announcements at this con or that? Yesh.

And i KNOW the roof will raise over the suggestion of dropping osX in favor of Solaris on mac....er, wow, my mind is blown that one might consider doing that for anything other than fun...for a few minutes. Wow, Sun is just makin me uneasy these days - glad i'm not in charge of any huge shops (i assure you that you are glad for that too ;-)

Solaris and Gnome over OS X?

[Offwhite98]

I wonder if it would be worthwhile. I know that Sun had a close relationship with the Gnome community to help improve the usability of Gnome but I still feel that OS X is a much better total UI than Gnome.

I could be wrong, but Solaris and Gnome still have some rough edges which need smoothing out. My biggest critisms of of Solaris/Linux/Gnome is they move onto the never version and new features before the round out and polish the last version. That last 5% of effort to make the software shine is really what sets makes the average computer user feel it is 100% better.

Re:Open is open, but to who?

[davecb]

I think he's preaching to the business community, for whom the ability to buy a different brand of computer for a new lab is a Real Big Thing.

Remember "vendor lock-in"? Used to happen with IBM mainframes, then Windows, and now, regrettably, with Unix variants.

The freedom to be able to chose a vendor is important to businesses and universities, and in principle to anyone who doesn't want to be locked to a particular vendor. Such as Sequent, who sorta doesn't exist any more...

I used to do a ton of porting for the purpose of unlocking stuff from vendor X or Y and making it run on "stock Unix", which is to say, pretty much anywhere. heck, I still do, on request (;-))

--dave

Re:I like his definition of open.

[jayminer]

Yes, this is one of the important points we (so called zealots, including myself) do not want to believe when we come home and fire up Konqueror/Mozilla etc. and jump in.

At work, I'm sure that many other Slashdotters are in communication with customers about open technologies.

For me, "open" may mean that it's totally hackable, modifiable and should include "fun".

For Joe, "open" may mean that it's possible to code to make it able to talk with his new XML based ERP system.

For Jane, "open" may mean that it's possible to save in an spreadsheet of office package X at home and embed it in the word processor of office package Y at work.

And so on..

We do have "our" preferences for the meaning of "open", but in the real world, we must achieve the fact that what we call "wide" open, may be restrictive for another person. This is what, at first, we should respect. Then we may have a peaceful settlement to all "open" wars around here or there.

Re:Ditch OS X For Solaris?

[divisionbyzero]

I know you are kidding, but your joke points out somethng interesting. You said desktop applications, not enterprise applications. That's where Sun's time in the sun (haha) served it well. Many enterprise class applications were made to run on Solaris or ported to it. That's where it has MacOS X beat hands down. The other stuff that Solaris can do (e.g. scale to 128+ processors, etc) is important, but not crucial.

Anyhow, I don't think any of this has anything to do with Apple. It's clearly IBM that Sun is after. First they say they will 'buy Linux' (i.e. SuSe) which is IBM's Linux vendor of choice and now they are saying they will also invade IBM's hardware. Good luck to Sun. Competition is good for everyone, except the losers of course.

Open Standards vs. Open Source

[booch]

His main premise is that Open Standards are more important than Open Source. On this point, I completely agree. Conforming to an open standard, which anyone is allowed to implement, is a great thing for customers. As long as they depend only upon the standard, they can choose whichever vendor they want. This is effectively a commoditization of the market.

What he fails to realize (or admit) is that Open Source has other advantages that build upon Open Standards. Even if an Open Source program doesn't conform to any well-recognized standard, the availability of the source can provide the same advantages. If you don't like the way Ximian is building their free Evolution mail reader, you can find another vendor who will take the existing mail reader and build you a custom version, fully compatible with the old. Also, Open Source programs typically embrace Open Standards with a passion. Look at Mozilla for a good example.

In addition, Open Source provides new advantages that Open Standards do not. The main advantage is control. If the company goes out of business, and you want to stick with their product, you can do that. If the vendor doesn't want to implement a feature that you want, you can do that. You get the advantages of commoditization, plus the ability to customize and modify things to fit your own needs.

Re:Ditch OS X For Solaris?

[Elwood P Dowd]

The Mach kernel's message-passing scheme for IPC has been known to be slow. Microkernels also typically have worse performance than monolithic kernels.

That's why OS X doesn't use it. XNU, honey.

Solaris uses a monolothic kernel.

Apple has poked holes in their microkernel everywhere they thought needed performance. I see no reason to believe that the micro-vs-monolithic debate can be so easily applied to OS X.

Solaris' scalability has been proven for many years on hardware with many more than two processors.

You are implying that Apple's support for 4 processors or more is not mature. In fact it does not exist. Their support for two processors is just fine, and that's the hardware that y'all would be talking about swapping OS X out for Solaris on. If that made sense.

For industrial grade iron, there is no reason to use MacOS-- it is too young and is not intended to be used on high-end server hardware.

Assuming that your definition of "high-end server hardware" does not include Xserves (mine doesn't) then not only is it not intended, it's not possible. There's no comparison to be made.

Explain why you'd want Solaris rather than OS X on a Macintosh . That was the debate. (I know there are reasons. I don't care about this idiotic debate. But you're talking stupid.)

Re:Ditch OS X For Solaris?

[squiggleslash]

I think the submitter put the cart before the horse.

I believe the reason Solaris is being ported to PowerPC is because Sun wants to jump ship from SPARC to PowerPC. It's so you can change processor, not OS.

Re:Ditch OS X For Solaris?

[jedidiah]

> 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.

"Those people" are the same people that SOLD Sun it's current NUMA technology.