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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.
For those of you that didnt RTFA here is the best part. Jonathan writes that the definition of open: Only a customer can define the word open.
Isn't the power architecture a superset of the designs used in PowerPC-based Macs?
This is not the first time Solaris was ported to PPC. Back when Apple, M$, IBM, Novell, Sun, NeXT, and MOT were all more friendly, Sun had ported Solaris to PPC and the ABI was then became the SYSV 32bit PPC ABI.
Even M$ had WinNT ported to PPC and IBM even had OS/2 ported too but those were the days.
No one in their right mind is going to ditch OS X on a desktop machine for Solaris. No one. It might have a chance as a server OS but given that you can already run Linux on the Power architecture, there's no compelling reason to consider Solaris unless you're already a Solaris shop and want to buy Power machines.
That said, I assume they're porting to POWER IV and V, which are user-instruction compatible with PowerPC, though the supervisor instructions differ significantly. Thus, a POWER series port would be a good start towards making it work on random PowerMac hardware, but initially, such a port would only work on the G5 (and even then, wouldn't support altivec and would probably require additional code to recognize the CPU version...). Additional code in various assembly files (start.s stuff and various VM system changes) would be needed to make such an OS work on older PowerPC CPUs.
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Johnny boy states that "Only the customer can define open" but then proceeds, to define it, not to mention plug Sun's products. This seems contraditory
Anyone care to speculate on the possible benefits for Microsoft if this happens? Since Sun are now sleeping with the boys from Redmond, there must be an alterior motive here... must there not ?
Nick...
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
Yup. PowerPC was derived from the POWER architecture; this page: http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-po whist/ gives all the details. (My favorite: the PowerPC can run in either big-endian or little-endian mode - although every use I've heard of runs it in big-endian mode.)
Yeah, AIX was added to Macs in 1995 (but only to certain models. See "Apple Network Server").
The Mac hardware thing is mostly a red herring, I'm guessing.
Here's my guess: Sun is considering the idea of dumping SPARC in favor of POWER. As things stand, they're way back in the raw performance game. Why continue investing R&D money into their own line of chips, if this is what it buys them?
Note that I'm not suggesting that they would become a pure software company -- my guess would be that they still design and build their own systems, just not their own chips.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
First line of article:
"Only a customer can define the word 'open.' That's my view"
Conclusion:
"Open as in door, is different than open as in source. Unix, linux, Windows - none are open, I'd argue. There is no agreed upon specification, no neutral test to determine validity, and no guarantee made by vendors other than rhetoric."
Apparently, Schwartz wants a gatekeeper to insure that all libaries and ancillary programs are standard between Websphere, BEA, and JES. In short, he's complaining that IBM keeps adding features outside of the TCK/AVK "standard" (apparently defined by Sun), pushing Sun out of the market.
Geesh, here's a novel idea -- innovate! Out-feature IBM, open source the environment and libraries, package support with a linux distribution, and then sell, sell, sell!
It's Deja Vu all over again.
Solaris 2.5.1 had a "PowerPC edition"
http://docs.sun.com/db/doc/802-4127
This was back in the day when you could also get NeXTSTEP for Motorola 68K, Intel x86, SPARC, and HPPA.
Those enterprise applications would not nessesarily run on a hypotehetical Power Solaris. Just as there is a big gap between apps supported on x86 Solaris v. SPARC Solaris, someone would have to convince ISPs that porting and supporting is worth it. The answer seems to be "no" for x86.
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.
But there are some big differences between Solaris and other big time commercial Unices and *BSDs and Linux on the one side and Mac OS X on the other.
Solaris on Sun hardware has some failover and maintenance jazz that Apple hardware doesn't.
Solaris and the others can be stripped down to bare bones to conserve resources and make the box more secure - I haven't seen this done with Mac OS X.
Mac OS X does things differently. From what I can tell, for example, the default shell is bash and typing vi will get you vim. Now I know the default shell in Linux is usually bash, as well, but many shell scripts that are written for ksh or c shell or something of that sort will behave a little differently in bash, and I'm sure there must be all sorts of nuances I haven't found yet.
I abhor diversity when it comes to computers its just a pain in the ass. Any chance I can get to have all my equipment running the same software I'd jump at. Jon's arguments apply mostly to the business end, he isnt trying to pitch superior tech, just a superior business/IT plan.
Depending on whether its a new install or an upgrade, the default shell is either bash or tcsh. As for stripping the box down to bare bones, I'm not sure what you mean, but OSX starts with no services running, which is pretty bare bones. You can also disable the GUI environment if it so pleases you (not like it hogs that much sitting at the login screen anyway).
Anyone who says "ewww AIX" hasn't run AIX in a production environment. There's a reason why banks and insurance companies run AIX. It's rock solid. And now that IBM's hardware is the fastest in the world, there's no compelling reason to run anything else.
To me, companies like Sun and IBM exist to provide services and integration.
In 1996, we considered moving the biz from a homegrown system (oldSCO and windows) to a fully integrated solution, from IBM or Sun. To us, it was what one does to get out from under the expense of running a homegrown system.
We were stunned. The salespeople wanted to do end-to-end replacement, at about 10X the cost of our internal solution.
Sp when people tell me that Sun and IBM compete to sell people hardware and/or software, I'm always like "eh?" these companies make their money selling complete solutions, through their VAR channels, etc.
So why this odd strategy? IBMs strategy makes sense--leverage the free platform of Linux to underpin your solution portfolio. This seems like an obvious and worthwhile strategy, except that, in all honesty, IBM does not appear (in the foreground) to be giving a lot back, especially on the usability/desktop front.
Sun's strategy--offer Solaris as an an alternative to AIX on IBMs hardware. Eh? WTF? IBM is already replacing AIX with Linux on their hardware...why Solaris? Why would anyone buy hardware from IBM to run Sun software?
Did Darl McBride come up with this strategy? "When SCO wins, IBM won't be able to run AIX or Linux on their machines--you'll own the world, along with us! Bwahahahaha!"
This is a strange strategy. To me, Sun would be better off to leverage their existing chip expertise to use AMD64 in superior ways to the commodity chipsets...things like bandwidth to perihperals, etc...places where enterprise use runs into bottlenecks compared to desktops.
Sun would also drop Solaris and use their software expertise to radically improve the usability of Linux, along the lines of OS-X. They would create application sets like garageband as an add-in.
Sun should buy multimedia software companies and bundle their products as add-ins. They would sign agreements with NVIDIA, etc.
The end result: A shrinkwrap linux that is as usable as OS-X and ass Staroffice (capable of running with Exchange) capability to to Single-sign-on with the DOD Common Access Card out of the box, full java development (of course), NVIDIA 3D support without downloads, as well as the aforementioned media applications. In other words, willing to distribute binaries under a license, which RedHat is not willing to do.
Sun is missing the boat. I'm guessing that a few years of work on their part would grant them a viable, sustainable market share of the desktop.
Hell, they could start a downloadable music service.
It's funny, I was just discussing this with a friend the other day. I really think this is the smartest possible move for Sun. It has been becoming increasingly obvious that Sun is seriously lagging behind in processor development. A move to Power and/or PPC would enable Sun to stop sinking money into the pit that is SPARC.
Although it has been pointed out several times here that POWER!=PPC (or Apple), I think Sun would be well served to make certain that any port they do runs on at least the Power Macintosh G5 platform (and any later Apple hardware). This would give Sun access to the many, many existing Apple workstations out there so as to provide Solaris with exposure to the Mac community.
Let's face it, although Mac OS X is a great OS, Apple doesn't really seem to be doing much to chase after the enterprise market, even though they now have what could be an enterprise-class OS (with some better documentation, anyway). The XServe is a fine machine, but it's hardly what I would consider "enterprise", with the possible exception of high-density clustering apps.
Solaris is a very good OS with a huge amount of support in the community, and good installed base at the higher levels. If Sun could get Solaris running on Macs and IBM RS/6K (or whatever they're calling them these days???), it could open up many more doors for them, while still enabling them to possibly design their own brand workstations and desktops on the POWER/PPC platform to compete with both IBM and Apple. That could also mean Mac OS X support on a Sun box.
I can't help thinking that this may be a precursor to shopping Sun out to one of the aforementioned competitors. Apple could use Sun, and vice-versa. An IBM+Sun pairing would probably mean the death of Sun.
Not that difficult at all, I assume. I'm not a coder, so I'm not all that certain. But, if Solaris is running on the Power architecture, the PPC is only a few steps away.
Could Sun be doing this to make itself an attractive acquisition for IBM or Apple (if Apple is truly serious about expanding its place in the enterprise?)?
I don't know why everyone is saying Macintosh, no where in the article did he mention Apple. I believe he means running Solaris on IBM's mid range PowerPC systems. The ones that are running AIX now. It is my belief that Sun wants to convince customers that they could standardize on Solaris instead of Linux.
.Net, but be open.
The meat of the article was that he feels that open means no vendor lock in. His point is that if you use Java and don't use any proprietary junk you could move your code with little effort. I agree in principle, but if I write the stuff in Java, then I am locked in to Java. Not that this is bad, but it would make sense for Sun to change the VM (perhaps open source it and go to the standards body and get it approved as a standard) and then get other languages to run on it. In a way it would be somewhat like
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
That said, Solaris has reasonably good binary compatibility with apps from SunOS 4 and any 32-bit app written to comply with the ABI specs of previous Solaris releases.
Hot-swappable if (a) you can find documentation to confirm that you can hot-swap system boards and (b) the system will let you DR the board out. The latter is a kicker, as I've seen 12Ks which wouldn't DR out a board because of a caged thread on one of the CPUs; I don't think we got an answer as to whether it was a kernel thread or part of Sun Cluster that was locking the board. The smallest unit on a SunFire system with domains is a system board, i.e. 4 CPUs + all RAM on that board. Solaris 10 introduces zones which take that limitation away; time will tell how well that runs. I'm pretty certain that isn't supported.