| Sun GPLs latest UltraSPARC |
Feb. 14, 2006
Jonathan Schwartz, president of Sun Microsystems Inc., announced on February 14th at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco that Sun is releasing its UltraSPARC Architecture 2005 and HyperVisor API specifications to open-source under the GPL. This new open-source project is called OpenSPARC.
Sun is making this move to help jumpstart the porting of Linux, BSD, and other operating systems, middleware, and applications to its UltraSPARC T1 processor.
The T1, formerly known as Niagara, is Sun's newest processor. It is designed to handle datacenter loads while reducing power requirements to 70 watts. It has eight cores and, with CoolThreads, 32 threads.
The UltraSPARC architecture code consists of the chip's microcode and, in particular, its CoolThreads multi-threading, code. The HyperVisor API will enable users to run multiple operating systems as virtual machines on the T1.
"Having Linux or BSD ports for the UltraSPARC T1 processor will greatly expand the SPARC market, giving customers more opportunities to reap the benefits of our CoolThreads technology. The OpenSPARC effort is fostering a community for SPARC-based, 32 thread innovation that will play a crucial role in redefining industry standards in the data center," Schwartz said in a statement.
To make it as open as possible, Sun has elected to place this newly opened code under the GPL 2.
"The free world welcomes Sun's decision to use the Free Software Foundation's GNU GPL for the freeing of OpenSPARC. We'd love to see other hardware companies follow in Sun's footsteps," said Richard M Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation.
OpenSPARC may eventually go under GPL 3, according to Simon Phipps, Sun's chief open-source officer.
"This new development is an important input to the ongoing GPL v3 revision, which needs to consider a wider range of potential uses as the worlds of hardware and software increasingly merge," Phipps said.
Kip Macy, the author of the FreeBSD port to the Xen x86 hypervisor, said, "The UltraSPARC T1 processor's approach to throughput computing is a refreshing change from other architectures and FreeBSD will one day be able to fully exploit the parallelism exposed by the cutting edge processor. The T1 is particularly interesting to me because I feel that its price-performance should, for the first time, make the UltraSPARC an important participant in commodity computing environments."
--Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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