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.

Comments

not really

[Anonymous Coward]

porting an OS is more than adding support for a CPU architecture. hardware drivers, for example...

Re:Ditch OS X For Solaris?

[HungSquirrel]

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.

Again

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Sun == erratic

[hot_Karls_bad_cavern]

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).

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-whi 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.

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 ;-)

Re:Power != PowerPC

[2nd Post!]

POWER == PowerPC, but PowerPC != POWER

POWER is a superset of PowerPC. See here.

Solaris and Gnome over OS X?

[Offwhite98]

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.

Re:Power != PowerPC

[dgatwood]

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.

Re:Ditch OS X For Solaris?

[divisionbyzero]

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.