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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.
porting an OS is more than adding support for a CPU architecture. hardware drivers, for example...
Why would you want to ditch OS X for Solaris?
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.
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.
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.
Sun produces both the OS and the hardware for their machines. Apple produce the OS and hardware for their machines. Thats what makes things Just Work (tm). Plonking Solaris on a Mac isn't going to do much for hardware compatibility :|
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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).
i 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.
;-)
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-wh
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
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.
Brennan Stehling - http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/
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.
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 $30 s3 cards with different PCI identification tags and such)... so it might be easy to pick up support for quite a bit of the peripheral hardware from the Linux world.
From our standpoint, it's goes a bit like "ewww AIX"
I'm not sure I'd shove it into a production environment, and what if IBM starts to throw curveballs into the works to thwart the people running Solaris. Still totally funny if you ask my opinion. Talk about a comeback to IBM's marketing strategy, but at what cost to Sun's hardware sales.
Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
...leaving the case off because you had tried to install a new hard drive and you got frustrated with it so you just left the PC sit open for a week because you just did not want to deal with it anymore.
Brennan Stehling - http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/
Remember "vendor lock-in"? Used to happen with IBM mainframes, then Windows, and now, regrettably, with Unix variants.
The freedom to be able to chose a vendor is important to businesses and universities, and in principle to anyone who doesn't want to be locked to a particular vendor. Such as Sequent, who sorta doesn't exist any more...
I used to do a ton of porting for the purpose of unlocking stuff from vendor X or Y and making it run on "stock Unix", which is to say, pretty much anywhere. heck, I still do, on request (;-))
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
Yup. PowerPC was derived from the POWER architecture; this page: http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-po whist/ gives all the details. (My favorite: the PowerPC can run in either big-endian or little-endian mode - although every use I've heard of runs it in big-endian mode.)
Sun just doesn't get it. We already have MacOS X and Yellow Dog for PPC. We have Sun and Linux the SPARC. We have M$ and Linux for the x86. Linux is the common denominator. Why the heck would we care about Solaris on PPC?
Sun is trying every last ditch effort they can to stay afloat. The company that believed the world revolved around Solaris and SPARC is now supporting X86 and AMD64 and talking about PPC. They're offering Linux solutions. Everyone else sees the sinking ship that is Sun, but Sun themselves. Unfortunately, I can't help but think the old adage of "a day late and a dollar short" is going to apply to Sun very shortly, if not already.
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.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
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.
Ugh, why would you want to?
Now, Solaris on an XServe... That makes sense... Server class hardware that doesn't suck, yet doesn't cost an arm and a leg, running perhaps the best multiprocessor Unix ever... Mmmmm.
The ironic thing in my view is that this is sort of what CHiRP was supposed to be - a happy universe where you could buy an RS6000 and run MacOS on it, or a Mac and run Solaris on it, or whatever. But then His Steveness decided that the clones had to go...
Several years ago, Solaris ran on Sparc and x86. Of course, the solaris X86 was the bastard child.
Likewise, mainstream Windows ran on X86 compatable only (yeah, NT ran on alpha, but that was a decade ago; And yes I saw NT on PA-RISC, but it was never released).
In addition, Windows will have a a 3'rd world distro that will cost but a fraction of their current stuff, but have 99% of what they currently offer. Historically, Bill Gates encourages theft of Windows as a way to check growth in other areas. That happened to Borland, Sybase, etc. These days MS claims that linux growth in 3'rd world country is so that it can be replaced by Windows. If so, then why do they think that a low cost version will be bought by end customers, when they can have it for free?
Linux and BSD run on many arch. and the 2 of them are making huge inroads into older OSs. Suddenly Windows and Solaris want to port to everything. Solaris on multiple platforms and low-cost to free windows is simply an attempt to stop Linux from wiping out sales
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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.
"Haven't you heard of this one running OSX on 2200 processors"
The Virginia Tech cluster isn't a machine, it's a pile of PCs communicating via MPI, like any other Beowulf cluster. What the previous poster meant was OS support for SMP... CPUs in one box handled by one instance of the OS. I'd be more than happy to see a 4 or 16 CPU Apple, but there ain't one. Anyway, as others have said, I think this Solaris ploy is aimed at IBM RS/6000 boxes, not Macs.
Luke, help me take this mask off
They already have. Broadcom NIC's already exist in Sun servers (I have one, a v240).
By spreading their 'industrial strength' OS to every platform and trading on their reputation, they are hoping to survive the shift.
Actually its a smart move.
Hardware has been commiditized into oblivion...
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
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.
SPARC is coming to an end, it's not keeping up with the other technologies out there. The CPUs, while technically excellent for their time, are failing to scale and the resources simply aren't available in the same way as they are for ix86 and PowerPC. Sun, realistically, has three choices:
- Stick with SPARC, and be left behind
- Ditch proprietary hardware and jump straight into high-end commodity PCs - they're sure to make as much of a success of it as, say, Commodore
- Switch to the ONLY other commercially viable and supported mass-market computer platform, and the only one other than SPARC that's pretty much open - PowerPC
If you were in Sun's shoes, what would you do? You wouldn't stick with SPARC. You certainly wouldn't want to try competing with Dell. Meanwhile PowerPCs are mass-market cheap, they're under active, competitive, development, thanks to IBM, Nintendo, and Apple, and reference platforms themselves aren't that far removed from those Sun produces right now - PCI (and successors), OpenFirmware, etc, etc.Whether Sun hates IBM or not has nothing to do with anything. Right now Sun has to do the right thing for Sun. If that means out-of-court deals with Microsoft, or buying CPUs from a combination of manufacturers that includes IBM, then so be it.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.