After providing Blastwave many of its PPC-based Open Desktop Workstations to speed up the port of OpenSolaris to PPC, Genesi has announced to donate $50 to Blastwave for each ODW sold, in order to keep the Blastwave community from shutting down.
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Blastwave has the packages of all the applications ( ready for Solaris and isolated in /opt/csw )and Blastware is the port project to the PowerPC and freescale embedded processors. Like the one on the motherboard of the SunFire Opteron machines running the service processor module.
Member since:2005-07-06
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>There are a lot of embedded systems that use powerpc >based chips
PPC != ARM i.e. PPC unit sales per year is around 60million.
Reference
http://www.tundra.com/NewsRoom/PressReleases/2005/pr_03_01_05.cfm
Member since:2005-08-17
hmmmmm...xbox360, sony playstation 3(Cell is powerpc), nintendo.
I see no dying of the powerpc.
Powerpc chips are cheaper to make but aren't produced in the same numbers as x86.
Maybe with all the next gen gaming console sporting PPC the price per unit will drop.
- Jesse McNelis
Member since:2005-07-08
Maybe you need to familiarize yourself with the history of Blastwave:
http://www.blastwave.org/about.html
The idea of selling PowerPC hardware is to assist with the porting of OpenSolaris to that architecture. Dennis Clarke just made a deal with a vendor of PowerPC hardware that makes it possible for people to purchase a "play box" without the potential crap shoot that eBay can be (especially for those who are not entirely familiar with PowerPC hardware). Dennis gets contributions to keep Blastwave running and Genesi sells hardware, from what I see everybody wins!
So what is "rotten" about that?
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The real target market for PowerPC is not the PC or desktop. That's just a small fraction of the market space. The real money is in the medical world, the automotive sector and the military. Control systems with embedded PowerPC based computers are most likely behind the dash of your car that you drive. As you can tell by the picture on the Blastware site, its on the motherboard of the SunFire Opteron gear.
Serious control systems need a serious OS that has twenty years of commercial application exposure and government certifications. Real time control systems in medical equipment run with the PowerPC processor. All of these are easy targets for an OpenSolaris port project and all of it can be developed on a standardized PowerPC OpenFirmware based system like the Genesi ODW. Throw in Java also and you have one heck of a huge target market long before you get to the desktop.
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2005-07-06
So, since how long has this effort been going on? It would seem that this has been ongoing for months already.
Wow, some exciting stuff is going on! Solaris already runs on x86 (32 bit), x86-64 (Opteron) and SPARC. With PPC, I think a major chunk of the CPU universe will be covered. What's left? MIPS? Oh, and ARM, of course - that one is quite interesting, I think. In the embedded market, ARM is probably the most ubiquitous CPU. The ARM core has been licensed to practically every microcontroller maker in the world.
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Member since:2005-06-29
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that' s good. i hope that they now can port solaris on ppc (polaris project http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/power_pc/ ) easily. more architecture, more choise
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That page on the OpenSolaris site does not link to Blastware or Blastave at all. Both of them are outside of Sun. It does have a link to a subversion site at genunix.org, which if you look it up, is owned by the Blastwave guy that was having a crisis just days ago. Now he is in some deal with Genesi for $50 a machine if lucky. Somethng about this whole OpenSolaris project seems weird. Like some marketing gag or some sort of stunt. Except that the software project at Blastwave has been around for years and then along comes this Sun thing. And now Genesi ? What is real and what is fake here?
Member since:2005-07-08
Uh, yeah you are about the only one! OpenSolaris.org and Blastwave are mutually exclusive, and what difference does it make that one does not link to the other? Dennis Clarke runs Blastwave and is a part of the OpenSolaris project.
So just where exactly is the problem? And by the way, nothing at either Blastwave or OpenSolaris is fake.
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Let's also not forget that Genesi has made a deal with Terra Soft Solutions, makers of Yellow Dog Linux, since Apple's news of dropping the PPC architecture. Genesi, as a hardware company, has a lot to gain from both the Linux and Open Solaris crowds. I for one will probably pick up one of their boxes.
