* Mauro Mozzarelli ([email protected]) wrote:
> > Are your AMD processors actually of a type that is
> > supported in
> > OpenSolaris for frequency scaling?  If they are
> > family type 15 or lower,
> > then they aren't and likely will never be because of
> > lacking invariant
> > TSC support.
> 
> Of course, family 15 exactly. Do you think that if I had a business
> case for a recent and more expensive server I would install
> OpenSolaris on it? It is expected that until OpenSolaris will not be
> ready for production it will be run by testers and early adopters on
> reclaimed hardware.

I'm not really understanding what you're trying to say here.  What I
will say is that this isn't really a business case issue.  It's a
technology issue (keeping in mind that I don't work on kernel code or
the power management code in OpenSolaris, I do however follow those
technology lists).  If those processor families had invariant TSC
support (like modern AMD processors and those from Intel) then
OpenSolaris would have supported them.  They don't, so they aren't
supported.

Now, there have been posts over the years on [email protected]
about this lack of support and the answer usually comes down to "it's
very hard to do *right* without invariant TSC support if at all and likely
not worth the large effort required".  If you'd like to see this
support, then step up and start digging in to the code :-)  This is
"Open"Solaris after all.

The following thread sums things up pretty well:

http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=448711&tstart=0

In a perfect world with no lack of resources I think you would find that
Sun would love to implement everything and scratch everyone's itch.
Sadly, we don't live in a perfect world and tradeoffs must be made.
OpenSolaris supports powernow on AMD processors from the K10 series
(barcelona and higher).  They were introduced in 2007.  Family 15/Turion
was introduced between 2003-2006, pretty old in terms of technology age.

> If what you say is correct it is unlikely that it will ever achieve a
> great deal of a market share.

I completely disagree.  For many reasons.  It already *has* market
share.  Think of all the Solaris 10 deployments (from which OpenSolaris
was initially started from).  Not to mention the people (like Joyent)
who are running OpenSolaris *today* in *production*.  Or all the people
using series 7000 boxes to manage their data, running on OpenSolaris
code.  Just to name a few.

OpenSolaris does a good job of supporting *recent* hardware (say stuff
produced in the last 3-5 years).  It doesn't do so well on stuff older
than that (although your mileage may vary) and likely never will because
there just isn't much return on an investment to support 'older'
hardware.  Now, if there were more in the community who wanted to "step
up" and add support for this older type of hardware then they would be
welcomed.

Anyway, as I said, it's not likely that OpenSolaris will get support for
powernow on older processor families other than what is currently
supported unless the community decides to step up and do the work or an
easier solution can be found (which from everything I've read doesn't
appear to be possible).  I suppose Oracle could decide to invest in this
work if/when they take control of Sun, but I don't see the logic in it
for them.  Expending resources to support 'old' hardware isn't exactly a
no-op.

My .02.

Cheers,

-- 
Glenn
_______________________________________________
opensolaris-discuss mailing list
[email protected]

Reply via email to