Scott Davenport @ Sun: (Mainly) Fault Management

Many of you no doubt heard about the Rainbow Falls processor Sun provided details on at the Hot Chips conference. I'm excited about this new SPARC processor. And not just because it's a nifty package bundling in more cores and the chops to scream running Oracle. This SPARC chipset will be the first to fully deploy the work I lead on sun4v platform independent FMA

In OpenSolaris today, the groundwork is there for building FMA topology sourced from platform firmware structures. Also, a rich set of platform agnostic CPU and memory diagnosis rules. I've also heard that the IO diagnosis rules will be moving toward platform independent constructs in the Rainbow Falls time frame as well. (I'm talking about the chipset specific IO rules; PCI/PCIE rules have been common across platforms for quite some time.)

Mental note for a future blog...once the reference implementation is out, I should write about how a platform team can go about deploying the platform independent enumerator and diagnosis rules in more details. For those looking at OpenSPARC and building a system, delivering top notch CPU and Memory FMA requires zero Solaris code changes. :wq