Frank Middleton wrote:
> 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.
Martin Bochnig has been posting to opensolaris-discuss, xwin-discuss,
indiana-discuss and various other lists about it for the past few years.
> The imminent demise of XSun
> (how imminent is it?) would undoubtedly be an incentive for others to do
> so as well!
The current plans call for Solaris 10 to be the last Solaris release with
Xsun in, and to never include Xsun in any OpenSolaris distro release.
> 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 :-)
The Xorg server for SPARC was added in Solaris 10 8/07, it's just not
had any usable drivers released for it on Solaris 10 yet.
> 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)?
Some are:
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/fox/SPARC-Xorg/
The ATI-based PGX cards work with a port of the ATI Mach64 driver used on x86
boxes for instance.
> 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;
Like all other Solaris features we're planning to remove, we've done that in
the standard fashion - published a notice in the Solaris 10 release notes that
it might not be in future releases:
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/820-5245/eos-36?l=en&a=view#getgg
It's been there since Solaris 10 8/07 release.
Future updates will add more of the SPARC graphics cards to the list of drivers
not planned for going forward - right now only cg6 is listed, but more are
going through the end-of-support process now.
--
-Alan Coopersmith- alan.coopersmith at sun.com
Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering
