On Mon, 23 Oct 2006, Jean-Daniel Beaubien wrote:
Jason George wrote:
I'm just wondering if the Niagara chip (by Sun) is supported on OpenBSD
Full and proper support of the Ultrasparc III processor is pretty much an
implied requirement first... and we're still working on that...
Sorry for my ignorance but why Ultrasparc III? I taught Niagara was based on
Ultrasparc II, and there is no talk ofproblems about UltrasparcII on
http://www.openbsd.org/sparc64.html.
"The Niagara chip is comprised of eight four-threaded UltraSparc-II cores,
and running at 1.2 GHz" Taken from:
http://www.itjungle.com/breaking/bn080206-story01.html - 3rd paragraph
The issue that Mark Kettenis is working on has to do with getting the US3
running at full speed. Currently, if you are running on a US3, you aren't
running at full speed because the cache is disabled. There are likely
fewer than 5 people on the planet running Mark's patches and I'm one of
them.
Small form-factor US3 machines (1 or 2U) are currently much more
interesting to many developers and users, both from a price and
availability standpoint. Not everyone wants to run an E450 in their
living room.
Given that Niagara is multi-core and multi-threaded and we don't have SMP
support yet for sparc64, it makes sense to solidify the current sparc64
offering first. That, and I won't mention Theo's thoughts on the "virtual
machine of sorts" that is Niagara...
Of course, interested parties with large budgets and desire to see this
work happen are more than free to contact me to have a project charter
written and a contract signed...
--Jason
