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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.

8 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.

  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?