Re: FOSS Open Hardware Documentation
What was the long term fall out of this? Sell out to Oracle, etc. On 2007-08-28 Tue 10:43 AM |, Theo de Raadt wrote: On Tue, Aug 28, 2007 at 04:08:02PM +0100, Edd Barrett wrote: On 28/08/07, Craig Skinner - Sun Microsystems - Linlithgow - Scotland Yay! Action at last. Wow! This is great news. Better late than never, but damn is it late. Indeed, that is the correct sentiment regarding Sun's action here. The facts of the industry are simply this: Approximately 95% of machine parts are documented (whether they are documented well or not is a totally seperate question). Starting roughly around 1990, Sun put themselves on the path of supplying only the absolute minimum documentation for their machine parts. Meanwhile, the PC really took off, and all the documentation for PC parts has always been out there (minus a few special cases that we have had to fight for). DEC released pretty much all the documentation for the Alpha right from the start, and later a few people pressured HP to release pretty much all the HPPA documentation. That left the largest straggler in the industry: Sun. And the case is that Sun has always had the documentation in-house; because of solid engineering principles in-house they document everything, perhaps because their hardware and software groups are seperated so much. Apple also has done a poor job of documenting their hardware, but looking at the quality of their hardware (with entirely pointless divergences between models that come out 3 months apart) we can guess that maybe we don't want to see them. Finally, there are a few American chip makers that resist the status quo, like Marvell and (to a lesser degree) Broadcom. Even Intel tries to play the open game now. Then there are a handful of (increasingly irrelevant) American wireless chipset manufacturers. But in general there are fewer and fewer closed vendors. But Sun had no excuse for this behaviour in 1990, and it is incredible that only now they will try to redeem it. So I don't say bravo, but I say about time. They don't get any points from me, because they are so late. I give the most credit to Craig Skinner who started the conversation at Sun with us (he found the right place to push Sun -- right at the top), and David Gwynne for continuing the soft pressure through the last couple of months. My biggest hope is that Sun's cleanup process does not delete too much information from the pages... like descriptions of hardware bugs and the workarounds needed for best effort operation. Because we already know that some revisions of Sun hardware have brutally bad bugs that ... even sometimes cannot be worked around.
Re: FOSS Open Hardware Documentation
Joco Salvatti wrote: http://blogs.sun.com/webmink/entry/open_chips_wiki_open http://wikis.sun.com/display/FOSSdocs/Home Yay! Action at last. -- Craig Skinner [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone +44 (0) 1506 673024 5-digit shortdial:x73024 Sun Remote Support Centre, Linlithgow, Scotland, UK
Re: FOSS Open Hardware Documentation
Hi, On 28/08/07, Craig Skinner - Sun Microsystems - Linlithgow - Scotland Yay! Action at last. Wow! This is great news. What I would really like to see is SMP for sparc64. Hopefully this has become easier now. -- Best Regards Edd --- http://students.dec.bournemouth.ac.uk/ebarrett
Re: FOSS Open Hardware Documentation
On Tue, Aug 28, 2007 at 04:08:02PM +0100, Edd Barrett wrote: On 28/08/07, Craig Skinner - Sun Microsystems - Linlithgow - Scotland Yay! Action at last. Wow! This is great news. Better late than never, but damn is it late. -- Darrin Chandler| Phoenix BSD User Group | MetaBUG [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://phxbug.org/ | http://metabug.org/ http://www.stilyagin.com/ | Daemons in the Desert | Global BUG Federation
Re: FOSS Open Hardware Documentation
On Tue, Aug 28, 2007 at 04:08:02PM +0100, Edd Barrett wrote: On 28/08/07, Craig Skinner - Sun Microsystems - Linlithgow - Scotland Yay! Action at last. Wow! This is great news. Better late than never, but damn is it late. Indeed, that is the correct sentiment regarding Sun's action here. The facts of the industry are simply this: Approximately 95% of machine parts are documented (whether they are documented well or not is a totally seperate question). Starting roughly around 1990, Sun put themselves on the path of supplying only the absolute minimum documentation for their machine parts. Meanwhile, the PC really took off, and all the documentation for PC parts has always been out there (minus a few special cases that we have had to fight for). DEC released pretty much all the documentation for the Alpha right from the start, and later a few people pressured HP to release pretty much all the HPPA documentation. That left the largest straggler in the industry: Sun. And the case is that Sun has always had the documentation in-house; because of solid engineering principles in-house they document everything, perhaps because their hardware and software groups are seperated so much. Apple also has done a poor job of documenting their hardware, but looking at the quality of their hardware (with entirely pointless divergences between models that come out 3 months apart) we can guess that maybe we don't want to see them. Finally, there are a few American chip makers that resist the status quo, like Marvell and (to a lesser degree) Broadcom. Even Intel tries to play the open game now. Then there are a handful of (increasingly irrelevant) American wireless chipset manufacturers. But in general there are fewer and fewer closed vendors. But Sun had no excuse for this behaviour in 1990, and it is incredible that only now they will try to redeem it. So I don't say bravo, but I say about time. They don't get any points from me, because they are so late. I give the most credit to Craig Skinner who started the conversation at Sun with us (he found the right place to push Sun -- right at the top), and David Gwynne for continuing the soft pressure through the last couple of months. My biggest hope is that Sun's cleanup process does not delete too much information from the pages... like descriptions of hardware bugs and the workarounds needed for best effort operation. Because we already know that some revisions of Sun hardware have brutally bad bugs that ... even sometimes cannot be worked around.
Re: FOSS Open Hardware Documentation
On Tuesday 28 August 2007, Edd Barrett wrote: What I would really like to see is SMP for sparc64. Hopefully this has become easier now. The major requirement for SMP on sparc64 is for some extremely talented people having both significant interest and copious amounts of free time. After spending years, if not decades, being yanked around by Sun on requests for proper docs and errata, you can understand why interest in such work isn't very enthusiastic... -about as much of a understatement as saying a supernova tends to brighten things up. ;-) jcr
Re: FOSS Open Hardware Documentation
What I would really like to see is SMP for sparc64. Hopefully this has become easier now. The major requirement for SMP on sparc64 is for some extremely talented people having both significant interest and copious amounts of free time. We have Kettenis. As long as I keep tossing him edge cases of breakage on Ultrasparc machines and he digs into finding out what's going on, we keep making progress. All in due time, but the magic doesn't happen overnight.
FOSS Open Hardware Documentation
http://blogs.sun.com/webmink/entry/open_chips_wiki_open http://wikis.sun.com/display/FOSSdocs/Home -- Joco Salvatti Undergraduating in Computer Science Federal University of Para - UFPA web: http://www.openbsd-pa.org e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FOSS Open Hardware Documentation
On 8/27/07, JoC#o Salvatti [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://blogs.sun.com/webmink/entry/open_chips_wiki_open http://wikis.sun.com/display/FOSSdocs/Home -- Joco Salvatti Undergraduating in Computer Science Federal University of Para - UFPA web: http://www.openbsd-pa.org e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] This is really nice and maybe we can expect better hardware support on SPARCs. This is probobly also good since I hope this puts pressure on other hardware manufacturers to open up their documentation. Maybe dlg@ can shed some more light on what is comming out of this from a OpenBSD perspective? BR dunceor
