Finally, this week Sun Labs will release the long awaited update to the Solaris for Power code. It has been a long road, but we have finally reached a point where Sun is comfortable with the release. As promised many months ago, the basic goal we have all worked towards was a functional Solaris on Power development environment which includes the latest source tree that boots on the PegasosPPC/ODW target and has printf() for debugging. The code meeting that goal will be released to the OpenSolaris community umbrella under a project (TBD) this week. At last!
While the road to this release has been long and bumpy, please remember that Sun Labs is a small research organization within a much larger organization, Sun Microsystems. The team working on the Solaris for Power port project has been small and has invested its resources wisely in order to achieve the desired objectives. We understand that the focus over the past months has been more on creating a functional development environment than on collaborating with the community, but that has been no problem for any of us. Without you folks it would not have happened!
To give you a better understanding of the objectives and what we can expect from Sun Labs going forward, the current objectives are the following:
1. Kickstart an OpenSolaris project and grow the OpenSolaris for Power community
2. Release to the OpenSolaris on Power community a functional OpenSolaris on Power development environment which includes the latest source tree that boots on the target platform, and has printf() for debugging.
3. Develop the Solaris on the Power Architecture port project to the point where it includes the latest source tree, provides a shell or single user prompt on the target platform, and has enhanced debugging, ie: KMDB.
Genesi will continue to assist as required in this process.
It is clear going ahead that Sun and Sun Labs' participation in the OpenSolaris for Power Architecture community will be guided by some basic principles:
1. They cannot and will not stray from the project objectives. This is where their energies will be focused.
2. They will support Sun's OpenSolaris project initiative by using the OpenSolaris.org infrastructure and mechanisms to manage the Solaris for Power Architecture port project. OpenSolaris.org is the focal point for anyone who wants to find out what the OpenSolaris program is about, what communities exist, and what those communities are working on. We will do its best to support from PPCZone. The code to be released will be a tarball available on the Solaris Power port project page, but the full project source code will be hosted on OpenSolaris with Mercurial.
3. As the lead members of the Solaris on Power port project, Sun Labs will release to the Solaris Power port project *new* versions of the software they develop when appropriate. Clearly, they will not release code to the project which they cannot stand behind, nor will they release code for which the due diligence process to release it would outstrip their resources - again Genesi will do our best to support this process.
We appreciate all the effort from Sun Labs and look forward wholeheartedly to making this all work - BIG TIME! Clearly, all contributions from the OpenSolaris community to the Solaris on Power port project are welcome! Thanks Sun for including us and thanks to all of you at Sun Labs!
R&B
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