I wanted to follow up on the platform discussion a bit. No question it is a very large issue that looms ahead of us, and the points discussed earlier are very well taken. One of the main reasons I like the PowerPC arch is it's versatility, integration and wide app range. But with this flexibility comes non standardization and complication in the whole target discussion... but I want to speak tactically for a moment.
The ppc-dev project's base goal has always been to get a kernel up and working. We are very close to having a single user prompt (SUP) up on the ODW. This has been alot of work and even if we get to the SUP we have tons more development to do before it is ready for primetime usage . This is work that we hope others now can jump in on. We have moved everything out to the project site and are doing commits there bi weekly. We continue to upgrade the build tools and the documentation. This development is happening here. It is also why we are now working towards the shared target approach. We will have shared build servers wih multiple ODWs, available externally such that involved developers can log into and run their code. We will find enough ODW targets to satisfy this need. The approach has worked well for us internally and should work well for anyone serious about development here going forward. Yes, eventually we need a longer term target solution but what that ends up being exactly for this community will be driven, IMHO, by factors related to the business adoption of solaris on ppc. Until that happens I cannot see us losing focus on our immediate goal of completing a working kernel, even if that is on a target that is not readily available to the masses. I also want to mention that we haven't spent a great deal of time refining specific platform work here. Since the ODW was very "PC like" there were a number of x86 based approaches that were straightforward to follow and utilize. We however have given a good deal of thought along the way of how to architect areas of solaris that would lower the porting effort on future targets. Additionally if we ever get to the point of needing targets for contributing developers and can't find additional ODWs, we do have access to a number of ODW like targets that we had developed in the Labs a while ago. Anyway, I'm confident we can continue to make progress with what we have and limit the amount of throw away code we develop on the ODW. But forward progress, and getting more of solaris up on this architecture is what we must keep as a priority. Tom This message posted from opensolaris.org
