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Solaris Coming to IBM's Power Architecture?

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the and-other-ponderings dept.

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.

12 of 419 comments (clear)

  1. I like his definition of open. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  2. Again by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Again by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Ah! Your memory serves you well. Solaris 2.5.1 was ported to Power. It ran only on an IBM RS/6000 Model 43P, the smallest box IBM made. It actually ran pretty well. It wasn't exactly an academic exercise, but suffice it to say the product never really found a market. They finally took it out of the catalog a few years ago.


      Makes you wonder what they're up to. Could this be a prelude to Sun trying to sell themselves to IBM while they're still worth something? Surely they've seen what has happened to SGI, DEC, and DG. Of those previous Unix Workstation Vendor Flamouts (tm), only DEC could be said to have had a decent burial.


      Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying Sun is going to die tommorow... the revenue off of DoD maintenance contracts alone will keep them on life support for another decade. But this would give them a chance to get out at better-than-firesale prices.


      Could also mean I get to see Solaris on a "fast" machine one last time.

    2. Re:Again by IPFreely · · Score: 3, Interesting
      I wouldm't say they were attempting to sell themselves.
      As processor architecture and performance changes ofer time, it becomes more and more expensive to keep up. Many times before, we've seen companies switch processor and/or hardware because their old basis was not keeping up. Apple switched to PowerPC from 68k. DG switched from 88K (or something older?) to intel. NeXT switched was attempting to switch from 68K to 88K but jumped to intel at the last moment. HP is making the jump to Intel IA64.
      Older processor families dissapeared because they couldn't keep up or were too expensive to keep up. Software moves on.

      I bet Sun is seeing Sparc performance advantage fading away and a cost sink they can't keep up on. IBM is doing a lot of work to make POWER keep up, and they're doing a good job. Porting Solaris to POWER could be a precursor to Sun making POWER hardware themselves rather than just using IBM hardware. Or maybe they will cut back their hardware all together and go software only on IBM hardware. They still have enough software value to make a go of it.

      In either case, it's not necessarily a dying gasp.

      --
      There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
  3. Easy decision by tommasz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  4. Re:Power != PowerPC by dgatwood · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Technically, the grandparent is correct insofar as the original POWER had instructions that didn't work on PowerPC (anything dealing with the MQ register, for example) except for the 601 (which was the first POWER family chip to be used in Macs, BTW, and the only one used prior to the G5).

    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.

    --

    Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

  5. Re:IBM's POWER != PowerPC by kzinti · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.)

  6. Why Solaris on POWER? by BinxBolling · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  7. Re:Ditch OS X For Solaris? by Ytsejam-03 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    First they say they will 'buy Linux' (i.e. SuSe)
    This article has a more realistic perspective on things. If Sun were going to buy SuSe, they would have done it before Novell bought them. After all, Schwartz himself said that Novell's products are "far less intersting" than Suse. Why pay the extra money for a bunch of Novell products that they don't want?
  8. What people fail to see... by l4m3z0r · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Alot of people seem to be saying how awful/useless this is and how sun is dying. Those who don't are talking about the various tech aspects that make solaris a viable thing to use. Both sides are failing to see the main reason why Sun would want to do this IMO. In order to be able to say to potential customers, look you have these architecture machines, our OS can run on them. I know that I would be much more interested in hearing some company pitch a solution if all my various architectures could be supported by one OS. My Power arch machines, my x86 machines, and of course the fancy new sparc stations they are trying to sell me could now all run solaris. I would love to hear that, I'd be say great, I can cut IT costs by having the support team worry about only one OS and the migration would be cheaper because I could reuse the expensive Power machines that we bought a few years back.

    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.

  9. Re:Ditch OS X For Solaris? by hexghost · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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).

  10. Sun is wising up. This is a good thing. by amper · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.