Sun Labs Gives PowerPC Development Environment to OpenSolaris Project

Published: October 12, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Sun Labs, the research arm of Unix server and workstation maker Sun Microsystems, has released an update to the code base of the "Polaris" variant of the Solaris 10 Unix environment that is being tweaked to run on PowerPC and Power processors.

According to an announcement made by John Crowell, who is a program manager at Sun Labs, the code that Sun is putting into the Polaris subset of the OpenSolaris project "provides the community with a functional Solaris PowerPC development environment on selected target platforms." Crowell says that this is a this is a modest step toward getting a fully functional Polaris operating system finished, but now Polaris includes the latest OpenSolaris source tree and has a shell or single user prompt on the target PowerPC platforms, and has better debugging through the inclusion of the Sun Modular Debugger, KMDB. KMDB is used to debug the Solaris kernel and related driver software.

In January, members of the OpenSolaris community announced that they had created a kernel variant for OpenSolaris that would run on the PowerPC platform, which was code-named Polaris.

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