Sun and Wind River Partner for Linux on Sparc T2 Chips

Published: April 29, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

While the Solaris variant of Unix is no stranger to telecommunications companies and service providers, who used Solaris to build up their infrastructure in the 1990s during the dot-com buildout, Linux is now a credible and desirable alternative for many telcos and SPs, and if you want to be honest about it, so is Windows for some applications. And that means that Sun Microsystems has had to swallow its pride and support Linux and sometimes Windows on its servers.

A bunch of early Red Hat and Debian Linuxes were ported to the Sparc architecture a few years back, but none of the volume Linuxes available today support any Sparc chips, T1 or T2 or otherwise. So you can understand why with the Sparc T1 servers announced nearly two years ago, Sun made a big deal about its partnership with Canonical, the commercial entity behind the Ubuntu distribution of Debian Linux. Because Sun had open sourced the hardware specs, the hypervisor software, and all of the documentation for the multicore T1 Sparc chips, Canonical had a relatively easy time creating a port of Ubuntu that ran natively on the T1s, which have eight cores (each with four threads) and which allowed up to 32 logical domain (LDom) partitions per chip. The T2 chips, announced last year, doubled the threads up to 64, and with the T2+ chips announced a few weeks ago, Sun is putting two T2 chips in a single system image and doubling up the memory and threads, creating a pretty capable rack and, soon, blade server that can run Sparc/Solaris and Sparc/Linux workloads. A lot of telcos and SPs write their own code, so recompiling for Sparc is not necessarily a big deal. But not having a commercially supported Linux sure is. And with Ubuntu 8.04 Long Term Support, announced last week, Canonical dropped support for the Sparc T1, T2, and T2+ chips.

Whoops.

Every problem is just an opportunity in disguise, and in this case, the opportunity is for Wind River Systems, a supplier of the carrier-grade VxWorks Unix-oid operating system as well as a homegrown carrier-grade Linux distro called, you guessed it, Carrier Grade Linux. Last week, as Canonical was pulling the plug, Wind River said that it would support Carrier Grade Linux and its related Workbench development tools on Sun's T2 chips. The two companies are not going to roll out this Linux on the generic servers that Sun just announced with the T2 chips, but will buy some time and only support the software on Netra-brand rack and blade servers aimed specifically at telcos and SPs.

What Sun plans to do to get a general purpose Linux on the T2 servers is unclear. With Ian Murdock, one of the founders of Debian in charge of open source software at Sun, you would think that Sun would hire a bunch of nerds (like maybe a dozen, if that) and create its own Solinux distribution and just get it over with.

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