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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...
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.
Because having the power of Unix coupled with a pleasing interface and scores of usable desktop applications is a disgusting perversion of everything Unix stands for.
$ whatis themeaningoflife
themeaningoflife: not found
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.)
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
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.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Yeah, when all those companies start buying IBM hardware just to put Sun Linux or Solaris on it, IBM will be in a world of hurt..... I mean, big hardware sales and service without the cost and headaches of software support. Can it get any worse?
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
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.
Compatibility with 64-bit apps written 10 years ago.
A decent threading model that has been in place for years. Last time I checked there were 2 competing proposals for a new Linux threading system
CC-NUMA memory allocation.
Hot-swappable CPUs and consolidation. I can dynamically split single Solaris instance, running on 128 processors, to N instances each running on 128/N processors.
Mature user/kernel profiling tools.
Stable device driver model. Drivers from Solaris 2.6 will work fine in Solaris 10. Meanwhile any Linux kernel patch that changes task_struct will require rebuilds of certain Linux device drivers. Yes...not a problem with all open-source drivers, but the world isn't all open-source (ask nVidia)
The kernel is more modular. I can swap in a different scheduler.
Trusted Solaris is available if needed
> 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.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.