Thursday September 02, 2004 Hoping to supply some real meat!
The intention is to supply folks with some real meat, rather than a bunch of fluffy potatoes. There's a lot of fluff distributed in the traditional channels, but the blogs at sun.com show more promise and set an example of the changes inside Sun
Intel EM64T
Jonathan Schwartz mentioned recentely in his blog about the Intel EM64T (Nacono) chipset and that Solaris x86 was running on it. To be more specific, this is the 64 bit Opteron port, which is great news and it shows that Intel's 64 bit extentions are so close to the AMD Opteron chipset that Sun's 64 bit AMD Opteron port of Solaris x86 was able to run on the Nacona chipset with virtually no modifications. I have heard that the engineers only had to modify only a single section of code which had to do with ACPI. Given the state of ACPI, this is not surprising, but really makes a statement about how close both architectures really are. I won't go into the great features which the AMD Opteron architecture presents over Intel's Nacona (such as the Hypertransport system), but suffice to say there is more to performance than just having the compatible extentions.
In addition, I have certified one of the EM64T systems with the Solaris x86 Hardware Certification Test Suite (HCTS) running S9 04/04 and this will show up on the Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) very soon if it's not there already. This shows that Sun continues to move forward in offering our customers the broadest hardware compatibiltiy, including any customers that may choose to purchase 32 bit hardware or who are looking to move into the 64 bit space, including Intel's EM64T chipset. Kudos to the Solaris Engineering team, you guys are one heck of a team!
Look for the Solaris x86 HCL to continue growing with more systems being added each week.
Mozilla 1.7.2, Firefox 0.9.3, and Thunderbird 0.7.3
Many of you use the packages which me and John Weeks build and post to mozilla.org. There was a delay with our SPARC builds as we ran into a glich and needed to do additional testing. Those builds of the latest packages are now up on mozilla.org to compliment their Solaris x86 32 bit counterparts. Please let us know if you have any problems as we plan to be every bit responsive to any problems in the community with these builds as can be received from any other source which builds them to date.
Sony X505
For those not familiar with the new Sony X505 laptop, you've got to check this out! This is such a small footprint for an x86 based laptop and it runs Solaris x86 today. I have seen this laptop running S10 and it is one nice laptop for those looking for the upmost in portability.
Catch 'ya all soon, gotta run to resolve some issues.
( Sep 02 2004, 01:19:52 PM PDT ) Permalink
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