Submitted by “The OpenSolaris Operating System has many features well suited for embedded systems now and in the future. The kernel is fully preemptable and multithreaded, it provides real-time capabilities, and the modular architecture is highly configurable. Because of these advanced capabilities, we feel there are interesting opportunities to extend OpenSolaris to new platforms, such as the ARM architecture. Therefore, we have created this project to configure the OS/Net (ON) consolidation to meet the requirements of embedded systems and to port OpenSolaris to the ARM platform.” The first release of the ARM port of OpenSolaris is now available. Installation notes are available.
Doubt it would be that useful, but a fun thought 🙂
I also very much doubt the usefulness of this. Seeing that a default install of OpenSolaris is more demanding than Vista in my experience.
but an iphone webserver 🙂
p.s. I said this in jest but its only a matter of time before SOMEONE does it!
Sorry about my ignorance, but what Vista has to do with this?
Besides, ease of installation is hardly relevant in the embedded space.
when will aix, vms and z/os follow? 😉
seriously: if linux and osx can run on phones, why not solaris? an arm port might even be usefull fpr servers, as arm attempts to move into server space:
“Chip makers have approached the company to use its low-power chip architecture in servers, which could lower power consumption and total cost of server ownership, said Ian Ferguson, director of enterprise solutions at Arm.”
http://www.itworld.com/arm-takes-on-intel-in-server-space-080619
actually, there are older arm-based servers: http://66.18.227.240:8080/ 🙂
Yeah, i think OpenSolaris on a Router (ddwrt-esque) would be awesome.
Choice is good!
OpenSolaris on a Gumstix PC http://gumstix.com/ would be nice.
To tell the truth, I don’t see that much sense in an iPhone with OpenSolaris… but OTOH, OpenSolaris’ FMA, multithreading and networking developments, and SMF make perfect sense on devices like PACs, moderns PLCs and routers.
I really would love to see it going that way, let’s see how far can this port get!
Now if only someone ports android to solairs/arm, maybe I could use Solaris as my primary OS on my G1 … =p
Will I be able to run it on my Psion 5mx?
Or my Acorn RiscPC?
Edited 2009-06-10 09:52 UTC
I think this might make more sense than some people realize. Two of the biggest costs for a data center are the power to run the servers and the power to cool them. ARM processors are now getting to the performance level that they could be useful for lower-performance server applications, especially if used in a cluster. As ARM chips get more powerful, and multi-core, multi-processor, very low power ARM machines become available, it’s an architecture that makes perfect sense in a data center.
As for Open Solaris’s use in embedded applications, I’m not sure I see that as being quite as practical. Every time that I’ve used Solaris, regardless of the environment, it consistently seems to be a sluggish memory hog. When you are talking about large companies that have mountains of cash to throw lots of hardware at those problems, it’s not as much of an issue, but I’m not really sure how that’s going to work with resource constrained embedded systems.