I've been quietly lurking on this list for some time now. My motivation for being here in the first place was that I'd love to see Solaris running on some of the games consoles on the market. Wii and xbox360 are based on a powerpc chip, and PS3 is based on a cell processor which has (I believe) two powerpc cores for general purpose computing. The reason for lurking is a complete lack of availability of hardware to do anything with powerpc.
I know these have been out of scope of this project, however my hobbyist interest would be to get those running. As mentioned by others previously, the lack of hardware has been my barrier to entry. An emulation environment would help greatly in getting people involved. Chris Dennis Clarke wrote: > Dear friends : > > As I sit here looking at a small stack of PowerPC architecture manuals > and assembly programmings books there is one thought that keeps crossing > my mind; what are we going to do about the PowerPC hardware crisis that > we are hitting? This project has been a battle ground at times starting > first at Blastwave and then we watched as Sun Labs takes the lead and > now we are ready to see a significant release. A significant release > that no one can boot because the hardware does not exist. > > All work in this project has been done with one single hardware > platform. The Pegasos G4 Open Desktop Workstation from Genesi : > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasos > > This was a fantastic little machine and I lived with it as my primary > workstation ( running Fedora Core ) for many months. It was during that > time that I enjoyed watching it push floating point around rendering > images with PovRay : > > http://www.blastwave.org/articles/BLS-0052/index.html > > Let's face it, the Genesi ODW was a great machine and if you have one > then it is *still* a great little machine. But you can't get one > anywhere and that is a hard fact. > > We have a few choices, as a community, to make. Let me propose two > options and then anyone else here can add a third if they see one. > > [1] The Genesi ODW was a well documented platform. In fact it > was called the OPEN Desktop Workstation because all of the > design specs are open to the community. Thus we can simply > make them ourselves. > > [2] We choose some other commodity platform based on the G4 or > even the G5 and move now before time marches on. Something > like the PowerMac G5 which can be found almost anywhere. > > The entire objective of this project was to port OpenSolaris to another > architecture. ARM or MIPS architecture based solutions would have been > just as viable but the PowerPC world showed more promise to us. Most > likely because Solaris has been there before. There were people around > that had seen Solaris actually running on PowerPC from the Solaris 2.5.1 > days and there was at least one person ( Martin! ) that had it running > last year! > > We need to solve our hardware crisis in order to keep marching forwards. > If we do not address this right now then we have no way to allow any > work to happen in the community simply because no one will have the > hardware. I can host a development platform at Blastwave but I can not > ship out the machines that do not exist. Personally I think that option > [1] above is the best way to go in the short term because we can simply > throw some money at it. I can talk with Bill Buck and perhaps get bPlan > on the phone and figure out what it will take to create twenty ODW > machines. Then option [2] needs to be discussed for the long term. I > really never thought we would end up with a kernel forever tied to one > machine only. > > Discussion ? > > Dennis Clarke > http://www.blastwave.org > > _______________________________________________ > powerpc-discuss mailing list > powerpc-discuss at opensolaris.org >
