Am Mar 17, 2008 um 8:58 AM schrieb Alex Perez:
> I'd suggest that by interpreting this choice as "targeting a segment", > you're missing the point. It's a simple practical decision with the > sole aim to lower the bar for accessibility to hardware for folks who > would > like to contribute their efforts to the PPC port. Yes, PPC macs are > dead. > They don't have the availability issue of the genesi, run OF out of > the box > (a known quantity for folks coming from/familiar with SPARC hardware), > and SMP machines are also very inexpensive. They are a very practical > springboard for PPC development. > > Furthermore, there are some very respectable (and affordable) CPU > upgrades available for legacy PowerMac G4 hardware available today. > They are based on Freescale 7448 and 7447A and compete computationally > with the performance of modern hardware, although you do still have > limitations with regards to system bus speeds, etc. > > The PowerMac is simply the most practical, available, and affordable > hardware solution that's available today and doesn't cost an arm and a > leg. It's an "easy win", and once it works reliabliy then the next > step would probably be to look at migrating the code to POWER5 or > POWER6, perhaps with IBMs sponsorship or a simple donation of hardware > to pursue that goal. > And this way you'll have the system ready to run on systems available to a lot of users at present. I have a G4 tower (Digital Audio model) with a Freescale 7447A dual CPU upgrade, 1.5 GB RAM and a SATA card. I'd love to run a PPC Solaris on it. I think supporting Mac PPC now puts Polaris into the hands of many testers early on, which can only strengthen the port for later. Perhaps there'll be more open source community support once it's available for something as common as PPC Macs. As for the PS3, I'd say if it's not too big a headache to get it onto there, sure, but I wouldn't make it a priority. There are more Macs than PS3s out there, I'm sure. Incidentally, I have run Linux on this tower in the past, but now it never wants to boot if I install it. It'll only boot OS X, and I've done everything I know of to reset NVRAM and such. Any thoughts? I figure if you're all developing for OF PPC hardware, you'll be experts in such matters. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/powerpc-discuss/attachments/20080317/3f9d849b/attachment.html>
