That will be really cool but there's no elements yet saying that MorphOS will run on the OSW. Unless Laire wants to go back working with the remaining MorphOS team, or build himself a kernel that can run the current MorphOS version on the OSW.
But that's amazing news for Linux (even if i still think that any X86 multicore machine is still more appropriate and cheaper for linux).
wait and see...

If Ralph wants to do this, we will fully support him.

If Ralph does not want to do this, we will respect his decision.

For Genesi and bplan, Ralph decides whether or not MorphOS comes to the OSW.

What Frank thinks is important too and certainly Ralph will take Frank's opinion into consideration.

R&B

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http://bbrv.blogspot.com

yes, of course, it's up to him. MorphOS on the OSW would certainly help having a first decent user base, just like it was for the Pegasos even if i fully understand that the OSW is aimed at a different target.

again, wait and see

i wish u a great success with this new platform anyway ! this is truly promising.

It needs some active work from the MorphOS team too. Xen needs a host OS, called 'domain-0' in Xen terminology, as Xen itself does not have much device drivers, just some hardware initialization. This could be Linux, as making the host OS is the more difficult part, and a Linux host will be hopefully ready end of Q3 (AFAIR, this date was mentioned on the Xen mailing list).

MorphOS also needs to be modified, as Xen does not provide direct access to the hardware, but provides virtual ethernet and disk to virtual machines. This means, that guest operating systems can not run unmodified (this is why Windows could not run on Xen until hardware based virtualisation appeared on Intel and later this year on AMD processors).

No direct access to hardware also means, that there is no access to the video card, just to an emulated text console. One can use VNC as a workaround (and AFAIK, MorphOS has a VNC server), but that can't do much with 3D applications. This also means, that MorphOS should be able to use a text only console and start a VNC server directly with the possibility of setting the VNC password on the text console.

As Xen on PPC is yet to be finished, it's still just brainstorming of possibilities (and limitations), and the MorphOS on Xen is a project for end of this year, or for next year.

CzP

DivX is a good example, look here for some
multimachine capable software. Support for multicore
is no problem either: just configure as many nodes
on one host, as there are cores on it:
http://www.exit1.org/dvdrip/

the osw is really starting to look interesting. As far as i know not many apps are programmed to take advantage of multicores, simply because their market exposure isnt great enough as of yet. (But we can expect it to change)

looking at the osw it would be perfect for data intense applications, like SQL databases and general management for clients with very little resources. For instance an EFIKA/OSW pairup would be good, but would require a high performance networking library

This is not true at all.

There is no conceptual difference between an SMP and multicore machine - it is two or more processors sharing memory and possibly a frontside bus.

SMP has been around for years and plenty of applications have been supporting it in the mainstream - Quake 3 is a good example of a game which supported SMP all of 5 and 6 years ago.

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Matt Sealey

This is interesting.
What state of the art 3D hardware are we talking about?

and without any decent 3D drivers under linux PPC it's pretty useless.

You are exactly right!

It is with great pleasure that we announce the fruit of a very productive partnership between Genesi and XGI/SIS: a native PowerPC 32-bit driver for XGI graphic cards. This driver has been compiled against X.org 7.0 using Mesa 6.4.2. We are using Linux kernel 2.6.17 release candidate 3 and a Gentoo Linux operating system.

We have also built a native 64-bit version of this driver on a 64-bit PowerPC Quad G5 workstation.

We are looking forward to shipping XGI graphics with our hardware solutions, starting with the Open Desktop Workstation and the EFIKA, as well as our upcoming $1500 Quad G5 64-bit workstation as well.

!!!

More details soon!

R&B

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http://bbrv.blogspot.com

that could be some good news.
At some time i got interested in XGI Volari cards and read a whole bunch of tests about their range of 3D cards. Everyone would agree on the fact that these were pretty good cards in terms of hardware but wasted by unstable drivers (Windows) and poor performance in 3D games.
I hope they will do better with linux and their new hardware as they are our last hope. ATI and NVidia ignoring linux PPC (especially after Apple's Intel switch).

all fingers crossed

I am hoping for the Volari V8 myself, at least for the OSW.

What I consider a pretty good card is my Radeon 9800 Pro AIW, but this one is already two generations behind.

Concerning state of the art XGI 3D gfx - but maybe Genesi knows something that we don't?

as far as graphics go with the OSW and the big players (NVIDIA/ATI) the latest generation of graphics hardware (plus the previous) support PCI express. NVIDIA looks like the best bet to lobby support from, being linux friendly and with the upcoming PS3 using linux and nvidia hardware and PPC processor. But ATI seems to be the underdog who wants to get on top with linux, especially after vista has been delayed again, apple moving to x86 and linux constantly improving. And that underdog status would be a good appeal point for the linux community.

For the Efika we are going with a V3XT from XGI, either ASIC or board - a single board solution still has to be validated. That V3XT card is low profile and uses only a heatsink so it fits in an ODW as well. I have also successfully used the V8 in an ODW. We will probably upgrade the HMC to the V8.

For the OSW I'm looking at the V10 PCI-Express. Genesi has a partnership with XGI and I ported their proprietary 3D driver to PowerPC. We have the source code for it and we have register-level documentation for the entire range of XGI graphic cards, allowing us to ship systems which have optimal 2D and 3D graphics on board.