“Tundra Semiconductor Corporation today announced the Tundra Tsi109 Host Bridge, the industry’s highest performing host bridge for PowerPC, will be integrated into the Genesi High Density Blade Server, demonstrating the Company’s rapidly strengthened position as the industry’s leading supplier of host bridges for PowerPC.” A lot of chit-chat press-release nonsense, but the bottom line might be that Genesi is trying to fill the PowerPC void left by Apple’s move to Intel.
It was pretty clear that they were trying to do that for a while. They struck a deal with Yellow Dog Linux to provide them with hardware. In the related articles they talk about the hardware vacuum. Just FYI, Yellow Dog Linux is a PPC red hat based linux if I’m not mistaken…
Articles: http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/news/2005/linux-user/
I’ve been interested in the Pegasus boards as a ‘toy board’ for some time, but Genesi doesn’t seem to be the most reputable company in the world. There is a lot of rather sordid history there (cough http://www.morphos.net/ and the Amiga lawsuits). Mind you, they seem to have garnered some success in the last couple of years.
I wouldn’t mind giving Debian a whirl on a PPC board…
Genesi won a judgment in the lawsuit. I am not sure how that casts a bad light on Genesi.
That morphos link is old sad news. there are people on that list that have publicly disavowed any involvement or claim. That is one person’s hate site that has done as much damage to morphos as it has done to Genesi (and yet Morphos and genesi keep advancing, making software or hardware releases, keep the developer sites updated…).
On the Pegasos/ODW Debian works fine as does Gentoo, SUSE, Crux, Fedora, YDL, Morphos and perhaps soon Haiku and Solaris. I wounder what will be the success of this blade now that Freescale has abandoned general host processing…
I am a genesi fan. They have solid customer support and I like the machine.
r/
Hmmm, they still screwed over Dale Rahn and other developers and I don’t recall any news about them getting paid yet.
http://www.openbsd.org/pegasos.html
I would not trust Genesi not even to buy a hobby board, I certainly would not buy a blade system from them where you are making a long term commitment to a platform and supplier.
I am not trolling btw, but if Genesi has changed it’s business practices and is now a reputable company it is time it put some ghosts of the past to rest and actually pay the money these developers are owed.
Well said. Screwing over an OpenBSD developer isn’t the best way to get any kudos.
Edited 2006-02-16 22:49
I have been dealing with Genesi for nearly two years. The OpenSolaris project created an opportunity to port Solaris to a whole new architecture and we needed a hardware vendor that would help us at every step. We knew it would be a long path to follow and we would need every technical schematic. We would need multiple systems. We would need support with no real possibility of return on investment for a very very long time.
Genesi stepped up to the plate and had provided free systems to people working on the PowerPC project. Genesi shipped systems all over the world at great expense and never made a complaint. It has been well over a year since I had my Genesi ODW and no one at Genesi ever asked for it back or for payment. Quite the contrary. When Blastwave was hitting hard times and searching for a corporate sponsor to help out Genesi stepped forwards and tossed in money. They never asked for anything and never even asked for a signature or a single piece of paper.
I really don’t know what the history is of these past problems. I can tell you that I have dealt with the Genesi people for a while now and I publicly will stand by them and will say that they support free and open development in the open source world regardless of if its OpenSolaris or Linux. Regardless of the extensive costs. They have been open, honest, honourable and supportive.
Dennis Clarke
Director Blastwave.org
I’m glad to hear that Genesi has treated you significantly better than some others in the past (some of the MorphOS developers and Dale Rahn of OpenBSD springs to mind). Hopefully they’ll keep on treating people and projects well.
The openbsd.org link doesn’t show the whole picture. See http://www.phinixi.com/tiki-index.php?page=OpenBSD-Peg%20Wrap-u… for a retraction from one former critic, Genesi responses, and other points of view.
There are always two parties involved when something goes wrong!
Maybe Genesi has made some mistakes (sure they did, who doesn’t?), but the others did so also. From the bsd guys POV it is easy to blame Genesi only, but to admit faults on the own side is always harder.
For the morphos story, same things apply as for the bsd story. Well, the OS was declared dead by some ppl (well, for some ppl the wish was father to the thought), but how comes that since this declaration the development was vivid and saw several major updates (V1.4.5, 3D update, MOS 4 PUP).
MorphOS is still supported by Genesi. http://www.morphzone.org
Look the the EFIKA Project Pages: http://projects.ppczone.org/projects.php?program=EFIKA
MorphOS is certainly supported as is EVEN OpenBSD.
Please stop the trolling bullshyt!
r/
> Look the the EFIKA Project Pages: http://projects.ppczone.org/projects.php?program=EFIKA
> MorphOS is certainly supported as is EVEN OpenBSD
Also see http://projects.ppczone.org/projects.php?project=129:
“OpenBSD
Developers: Robert Nagy
Approved On: 17th February 2006
The OpenBSD project produces a FREE, multi-platform 4.4BSD-based UNIX-like operating system. Our efforts emphasize portability, standardization, correctness, proactive security and integrated cryptography. It would be great to see OpenBSD running on EFIKA as an embedded system.”
🙂
— Gary
I don’t understand why people started all the time such off topic trolling. There are thousands of Pegasos users around the whole world and there are many community sites growing each day. It seems they are all happy with the choice they made and don’t have any problems. Nobody is perfect for sure but they will learn from their failures.
So com’on get back to topic please.
…awesome! Genesi rocks!
Who are these people who need low-performance PowerPC/Linux computers? Amiga users?
Because of licensing issues, AmigaOS 4.x won’t run on Genesi hardware.
MorphOS, which does run on Genesi hardware, is API-compatible with AmigaOS 3.1 and a completely satisfactory PPC implementation, judging from users’ opinions. It is too bad about AmigaOS4, but that’s the decision the Amiga partners have made.
Hi,
I currently work for Genesi and have been in communication with some of the openbsd developers about how we can straighten things out. We have a long way to go, but the first steps have been taken on both sides. I hope we can report to you some good news in the future.
Best regards,
Pieter Van den Abeele
Whenever I see announcements like these it just doesn’t seem like there is any meat to them. Talk about a severe niche market where is the list of advantages to running this hardware and how does it serve business needs? Or is this just for hobbyists
Not impressed by the high density blade? Then you don’t know the market “smartpatrol.” Maybe you better read up a bit. There are links in the PR: http://www.genesippc.com/hdb.php
Still not impressed? Then look too the left of the page and get a look at the big picture: http://www.genesippc.com/of_presentation.php
And, just in case you are not reading the bbrvblog maybe you better tune in to that too, smartguy: http://bbrv.blogspot.com/2006/02/soc-4u2.html
I hate trolls!
r/
Maybe I’m biased because I work on blades, but I don’t see the point of the HDB either. Sossaman blades should provide similar performance per U but cheaper and with fewer cores.
OF is nice, but it’s not enough incentive to switch platforms IMO.
So what you are telling me is that with Genesi I have the option to run Yellow Dog Linux on dual G4 blade servers. Tell me again genius why would I want to do that when I could run RedHat Enterprise, Windows 2003 server or Solaris x86 on modern 64-bit Xeon blade servers? Or better yet IBM Power 5 blades running AIX? Don’t let your fanaticism for Genesi get in the way of plain common sense. These systems have a coolness factor I will admit but have an extremely limited business application.
Well do not forget that there is the power usage which is important too (doubly so as any heat generated will have to be removed too).
@Walter, Smartpatrol
What I like about this is the support coming. Look here: http://polaris.blastwave.org/ and here http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/SupportedPowerPC?highlight=%2… and here http://www.novell.com/partnerguide/company/48832.html and here http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/products/genesi/ and not Windows I agree. I think the new blades will be supported in all those places. Second thing I like is that it is about lower electricity costs and lower operating temperatures. It is not about the speed of the processor. I did once here about a ODW AIX port. An engineer from IBM did it. Finally, the intention as I understand it is to completely release the design as they did with the Pegasos. Sun and everybody else is not doing that. Thanks for not trolling – i like this site!
r/
I apologize for creating a monster and enough troll bait for R&B. Unfortunately, I relayed information that was not true. I took a big hit for it, and I have had a few conversations with R&B about it over the past 2 years. However, R&B and I do talk on a regular basis. I can’t say the same for anyone else
.
Most of the time, we talk about other things relating to the ODW and what else is going on with this market.
Enough with the past, we’ve all moved on. Genesi actually has something decent going on and are attempting reconciliation. Those who decided to run their mouths and not have something to show for it aren’t here.
I just have kept my mouth shut because I didn’t want to add insult to injury. Unfortunately, I caused people harm, and I made my apologies privately.
Thank you.