On 03/17/09 21:07, Alan Coopersmith wrote: . >> Is there any reason why the SPARC community couldn't do their own port? > > None at all, but the one person who tried to port the BSD/Linux Xorg drivers > (and got most of them working) has been repeatedly frustrated at the lack > of interest in helping or even testing his work by the SPARC community, and > he quit trying. We're still hosting the work he did so far on a project > gate on opensolaris.org should he decide to try again or someone else decide > to take up the cause.
As far as I know, for everyone who loads Solaris of any kind for SPARC, Sun knows who they are and has their email address. I bet they all also subscribe to the bigadmin newsletter. If I had known that someone was doing a port of the BSD/Linux drivers, I would certainly have volunteered to help in any way possible. The imminent demise of XSun (how imminent is it?) would undoubtedly be an incentive for others to do so as well! Isn't there a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem here, too? AFAIK Solaris never had support for xorg, so porting to xorg wasn't really interesting before. Anyway, we have the chicken now, so working on the egg seems much more worthwhile :-) >> If Sun were to release the information we'd need to do such a port, > > Sun cannot release the information for the cards such as XVR-600 as we > are bound by NDA's with the companies like ATI& 3Dlabs they were OEM'ed > from. I'm only looking for afb and ffb. Are drivers for the OEM cards in the BSD/Linux port (I suppose they would have been reverse engineered)? I suppose the way to get this effort revived might be to start an new thread just on this topic, and see what kind of interest there might be. I'm also having a problem with USB keyboard support, and the good folks in Beijing gave it a shot, but I suspect they are not in a position to support obsolete hardware either, so I'm probably going to become a Solaris driver expert anyway, although the scope of porting something on this scale is a bit daunting. How likely is it that the person you mention above might be willing to try again, assuming more enthusiasm on the part of the SPARC community and given that it is quite possible few of them were (are) aware of the port and/or the ending of XSun in Open Solaris? Do you know if Sun will maintain XSun in the commercial version of Solaris, or will it go away there, too? If so, surely Sun should alert all their customers about this; I suppose if Sun alerted the folks who uploaded Solaris for SPARC about it, at least they'd all have a chance to take some action, especially if they were aware of the encumbrance issues with XSun. There are so many discussion groups on OpenSolaris, one can't possibly subscribe to them all. Alfred pointed me to this one after I stumbled onto his blog, and if it wasn't for that, I wouldn't have known about this either...
