I’ve just published a (brief) account of the history of Sun Microsystems. Yes, a big part of my business revolves around Sun, Solaris, and related technologies – but the reason I got involved in the first place is because Sun itself is such an interesting company.
Have a read of The History of Sun Microsystems and let me know what you think.
Back in 2005 when Sun released the Niagara chip – the UltraSPARC T1 – they also took the unusual step of open sourcing the hardware design of the CPU. Having a ground breaking 8 core, 32 thread CPU was impressive enough, but sharing the internals with anyone who was interested – awesome!
Recently Sun have announced a partnership with Europractice, who are a pan-European group setup to promote student learning of chip design across Europe. It follows on from the successful Eurochip organisation which had similar aims.
With Europractice, Sun are making CPU design details, chip architecture documentation, and FPGA tools available to Universities across Europe. As part of that, Sun are hosting two one day events in London at the beginning of December to spill the beans on all aspects of the OpenSPARC design, as well as some history of the SPARC family.
Sadly this is only open to Europractice members from academic institutions, but Sun have continued their theme of openness by making all the slides and documentation available via their web site.
You’ll need a (free) Sun site login, but head on over to https://wikis.sun.com/display/OpenSPARC/Slidecast+-+All+About+OpenSPARC and download over 5 hours of slides, complete with voice overs and designer notes.
In 2005 I was having some issues with big F15k domains. They have a mix of 1gb/s and 100mb/s network cards, which all used the same Solaris driver family. Setting the port speeds meant editing the ce.conf file, and any typos or mistakes here either hung the kernel on boot (not good news in a big F15k domain) or just ignored the settings.
I ended up writing a script that would automatically work out what ce cards were present in the Solaris domain, and then automatically generate a ce.conf configuration file. The script grew in complexity when it became clear the F15ks and mid-frame machines (SF6500 etc.) had a radically different PCI addressing scheme.
I ended up writing and submitting a tech tip to Sun’s BigAdmin website. You can read the whole sordid story at http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/content/submitted/config_ce_cards.html
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| LinkedIn: Tom Kranz | Skype: siliconbunny |
