I'd contact Tadpole and Sun directly. Tadpole seems to be doing well enough to stay in the market, and I'm sure they are aware of the issue, but really haven't thought about contacting Sam. At the price of SPARC notebooks, I'm sure if they just sold 25 it'd make up for the development cost. Their main target is government organizations, which prefer having the best security, and the current state of wireless on SPARC is still on WEP, which is pretty much non-existent in the government space, everyone has moved to WPA2 enterprise with two-way user/certificate authentication using RADIUS. Sun sacked their Ultra3 mobile platform since it was just a rebranded Tadpole, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't be willing to spend $5K USD for the effort. Just see the recent $1mln transfusion for open-source Sun sponsored projects, $5000 is chump change compared to that.
Personally I will not donate, because I don't have a SPARC laptop, nor intend on getting one, they just can't deliver the performance per watt and by weight. I can see the value in the expansion (16GB memory, 2 sockets) but it's not a value worth the effort for any market except the government space. I only value their existence for the fact they are rugged, followed by the fact they are SPARCv9 compliant, full backwards compatible, big organizations value this. I still support the effort. The HAL's ports are for ARM, MIPS, x86, x86_64, SPARC, but as you said for Linux. Again, try Sun and Tadpole directly, escalate the request to the internal driver teams and to those who handle enterprise/government markets. James On Jan 7, 2008, at 1:16 PM, Garrett D'Amore wrote: > I've sort of pursued this idea for a while now, but one of the major > areas where SPARC-based laptops (and also desktops, if they want it) > lack is wifi support. We have excellent solutions for Intel/AMD > platforms, but right now the only SPARC solutions available are fairly > low end 802.11b chips, without WPA support. > > The tragedy here is that this gap is *easily* solved, with only a > small > amount of effort. Basically, the problem is that we need a HAL layer, > then we could use Atheros devices on SPARC platforms. The HAL > itself is > portable, and mostly we just need one that is recompiled for Solaris > SPARC. (The Linux SPARC one won't work because our kernel needs some > slightly different compiler flags.) > > Sam Leffler of Errno Consulting once told me, while I was employed at > Tadpole, that he'd be willing to do the work, and commit to sustaining > the Solaris SPARC platform for the HAL layer, if someone would pay him > some money up front. (Its probably on the order of a couple thousand > dollars.) This is how he makes his living, so it isn't unreasonable. > (And nobody else can do this work, as only he has access to the HAL > source code, although I believe Atheros has a copy in escrow as well.) > Over the course of the last few years, I asked around, and failed to > drum up enough interest from the companies that should care most -- > Tadpole and Sun. So now I'm going to the field where there may be > folks > with these platforms. > > I'm willing to coordinate the effort, act as a treasurer, or whatever, > and ultimately manage the process of getting the bits integrated into > ON. But I can't afford to pay Sam entirely out of my own pocket. > However, I'll put up $50 to the cause. If other folks are interested > in contributing, please let me know. Once I know that we have > enough to > pay Sam to do the work, I'll work out a way to get Sam paid. > > Btw, I would still love to hear from any of the SPARC laptop > vendors, if > they wanted to fund the work themselves (either in whole or in part). > Those of you who have purchased SPARC laptops from a vendor can > forward > this e-mail to them. > > -- Garrett > > _______________________________________________ > laptop-discuss mailing list > laptop-discuss at opensolaris.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/laptop-discuss/attachments/20080107/2f282d80/attachment.html>
