Ubuntu to Support Linux on Sparc T1 Chips

Published: June 6, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Even though Solaris will always hold the inside track when it comes to supporting features on the Sparc chip architecture, Sun Microsystems knows that it has to take an extremely open approach to its hardware and software if it wants to become a true volume player in the server racket. And that is why the company is enthusiastic about getting Linux ported to its new "Niagara" Sparc T1 processors.

But, as you might expect, Sun is not as interested in helping rival operating system platform providers Red Hat and Novell make money with their Linuxes as it is in convincing other Linux providers to support their distros on the T1s, thereby taking a whack at the X64 server vendors and the two main Linux platform providers and the Windows platform from Microsoft all at the same time. Think of it as hitting a triple play, since any sale of a non-X64, non-Windows platform does, in some way, weaken Microsoft. This might be the reason why Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's new chief executive officer, has been talking up the Ubuntu variant of the Debian line of Linux in recent weeks. Canonical, which releases Ubuntu 6.06 Long Term Support Server Edition on June 1, is also interested in getting some press around its efforts to move from Debian desktops to data centers and departmental servers.

As it turns out, Sun has been courting the Ubuntu community to support its Sparc platforms for quite some time. According to Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical, the commercial company that provides support for the Ubuntu variant of Linux, about eight or nine months ago, as the Ubuntu project was readying its first server release, the people behind the project looked at the power and thermals of the then-future Niagara servers and thought that this was an interesting alternative to X64 servers running Linux for edge computing--infrastructure workloads such as Web, print, file, and e-mail serving.

Shuttleworth says that the fact that Sun made the specs for the Niagara chips available through its OpenSparc project made it possible for Ubuntu to do a fairly quick port to the Sparc architecture. "Traditionally, when you do a port, you end up reverse engineering all of the features that tie into hardware," explained Shuttleworth. "But in this case, the transparent access to specifications made it very fast and easy." Canonical was expected to take until August or October to get the new Ubuntu server running on the Sparc T1s, but because of the open specs thanks to the OpenSparc project, Sparc's very new T1 chips are going to get day one support, right alongside X64 chips.

Even though there is no technical limitation to running Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Server Edition on any Sparc-based machine all the way back to the UltraSparc III processors, Shuttleworth says that only the Sparc T1 chips running inside Sun's T1000 and T2000 servers have been certified to run the Ubuntu server and are therefore able to get installation and technical support from Canonical. Such support costs $700 per year per server for business hour support. While Shuttleworth said Canonical and the Ubuntu community would not devote resources to making Ubuntu Linux span a 72-way, 144-core UltraSparc-IV+ server, he did think that the idea of running Ubuntu inside virtual or logical partitions on such big iron was an interesting possibility. Neither Sun nor Canonical would say if Ubuntu would be certified on the Opteron-based "Galaxy" server line from Sun, but it is hard to imagine that it will not be.

Sun is not, by the way, preconfiguring Ubuntu on servers, and Canonical is not even providing a CD or DVD set for the server variant, either. If you want Ubuntu on your Niagara server, you have to go get the download and do it yourself. "Somebody who buys 50 T2000s is quite comfortable with fetching Ubuntu and deploying it from a download," said Shuttleworth. The Ubuntu project does have a CD for its desktop edition, but that is because many of the people who are trying Linux today are comfortable with popping a CD in their machine and installing an operating system, but they may not have as yet mastered the art of of retrieving ISO images and burning their own CDs.

In a separate announcement, Canonical said that that Ubuntu LTS Server Edition, which will be supported for five years, will come with scripts that allow companies to install a Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl/PHP/Python software stack with the execution of a single command.

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, which uses the Gnome user interface, has a parallel variant that uses the KDE graphical user interface, called Kubuntu. Both run on 32-bit X86, 64-bit X64, and 32-bit and 64-bit PowerPC processors; Apple Macs using G3, G4, and G5 processors have been certified to run Ubuntu and Kubuntu, too. A few weeks ago, the server edition was updated in its beta program to include two new kernel modifications tuned for servers, a generic "server" kernel for servers with one, two, or four cores or sockets and a "big iron" kernel that is aimed at servers with eight cores or sockets. The 6.06 release is based on the Linux 2.6.15.6 kernel.