I would like to take this opportunity to nominate a new OpenSolaris Community.
Name: Porting
Description: A community dealing with issues in porting OpenSolaris to other
architectures and systems and to issues surrounding OpenSolaris portability.
Statement of Purpose: As OpenSolaris has matured, interest has grown in
porting it to a variety of hardware platforms and processors. In addition to
the efforts of the existing "PowerPC" Community, there are current or
investigational efforts to port OpenSolaris to the IBM Z series mainframe (as a
guest OS) and to the ARM processor, and there has been interest in supporting
OpenSolaris on various platforms that are related to but will not be directly
supported by normal Solaris releases (e.g. AMD or Intel SoC-based embedded
systems.)
In addition, various porting projects inside and outside of Sun have uncovered
issues that would be well addressed as projects under the porting community
umbrella, such as toolchain issues (GNU vs. Sun compilers, cross-compiling and
cross-linking issues, etc.), assumptions made by current "common" OpenSolaris
code that are actually hardware-dependent (e.g. that hardware always provides an
atomic 64-bit compare and swap instruction) and issues surrounding the use of
OpenSolaris for embedded systems (e.g. shortening boot time and reducing
OpenSolaris' initial memory footprint and the number of packages it provides.)
This area of investigation may also include projects to address issues that
currently restrict OpenSolaris' portability, such as its reliance upon
operation on a processor providing a strong memory ordering model.
Therefore it seems the natural way to handle these issues is via the creation
of a "Porting" OpenSolaris Community.
Many of these issues have come up in the course of work on the PowerPC port by
the existing "PowerPC" Community, but those issues would be better served by a
more general-purpose Community under which existing PowerPC work could be
defined as a project.
Therefore, the creation of this Community will be followed shortly thereafter
by the dissolution of the "PowerPC" community, with its projects becoming
projects under the "Porting" community. (Existing PowerPC-related mailing
lists will not be affected.)
Here are the initial assignments for the proposed "Porting" Community:
Facilitator
===========
William Kucharski william.kucharski at sun.com
"Porting" Community Core Contributors
=====================================
William Kucharski william.kucharski at sun.com
Tom Riddle rarebitusa at yahoo.com
Dennis Clarke dclarke at blastwave.org
Karl Volz karl.volz at sun.com
Current OpenSolaris Core Contributors
=====================================
William Kucharski william.kucharski at sun.com
Tom Riddle rarebitusa at yahoo.com
Dennis Clarke dclarke at blastwave.org
Please feel free to contact me with questions, concerns or anything I may have
presented incorrectly in the proposal above, as I'm new to this.
Please also let me know if additional work is required to dissolve the existing
"PowerPC" Community so that that work may be performed in parallel with work
leading towards the creation of the "Porting" Community.
All of those listed above have agree this Community proposal should be
presented
to the OGB for consideration.
Further, the current OpenSolaris Core Contributors named above form a majority
of the Leaders of the existing "PowerPC" community.
William Kucharski
