It appears that we're pretty much in agreement, with the exception of having and AMD community. Point taken... how about if we propose an x86/64 community instead?
I still think we all need to encourage projects around technologies/value-add rather than around platforms. Do you see any issue with proposing a IOMMU project outside of a particular platform's project space? -George -----Original Message----- From: James Carlson [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, October 16, 2007 7:56 AM To: Herman, George Cc: Ostrovsky, Boris; ogb-discuss at opensolaris.org Subject: RE: [ogb-discuss] Creating a place for AMD-related work Herman, George writes: > After reading the description of community and project, it would seem > that the option that best meets the project guidelines is number 2. (The > guidelines seem clearly state that communities should sponsor projects, > and not projects sponsor/create new projects.) I wasn't at all suggesting that you have your project "endorse" some other project. Instead, I was suggesting that *if* your concern is that you have multiple related subprojects and if those subprojects were all sharing code and development, then it may well make sense to have a single project with divided resources for the subprojects. The current infrastructure supports such an organization, and there's low overhead. You can certainly start a new community if you feel that's necessary. The process for that is in the consititution, and requires OGB approval, as described in article VII: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/ogb/governance/ You'll need to work through the issues described in 7.4, including the trademark problem, to get this done. As for my comment on such a proposal, I think that if it were limited to AMD platforms alone, then it might well be too narrow, as it would likely overlap common bits with the Intel work being done. The existing PPC community is similarly too narrow ... and in fact has just one project. > Using option 3 would seem to create some problems. If we setup related > projects for each of the platforms and have projects that are related, > this seems to be requiring engineers to endorse, monitor and work in > multiple spaces on related projects. It means that the folks involved in the project need to cooperate. > In addition, this could require > competitors to work in a competitor's project area. If the platform > community sponsored a project, and a neutral/common project then gets > created, multiple vendors would be able to contribute to a common > project. That's in the nature of open development. We're all working on OpenSolaris here, so the fact that some addresses end in "intel.com" and others end in "amd.com" isn't actually something I think that the OGB ought to address. A more important issue, I think, is proper system architecture and design. If, as I think you're asserting, there are common pieces that should be shared between Intel and AMD platforms, then I would assert that it's a fundamental _requirement_ that these things are designed and implemented. At least as a matter of the core software repository (opensolaris.org), I don't believe it's acceptable to see external political divisions (of any sort) encoded into the system design. > Case in point... we want to start an AMD IOMMU project. I understand > that there is already a project started in the Intel space. (I can't > seem to find it... which is another problem.) If this project was > already in the Intel project space, it would seem that we would have to > work in the Intel project space, or deal with the issues of merging two > project spaces. In addition to this being awkward/frustrating for > competitors, it would seem to be a hassle for the Sun engineer working > on any common code. We've seen the lack of merging before, due to internal political divisions within Sun, and it's uniformly painful. At an architectural level, I would _insist_ that these two projects work together on common goals. I don't actually care how that happens, though. If the high level issues are hashed out in one of the community groups (device drivers?) and then a suitable non-partisan joint project is created, that'd be great. There are probably other ways to divide up the work. > Wouldn't it be preferred to have a project (IOMMU) defined in a more > neutral space that might be sponsored by multiple communities, like > device drivers, AMD, Intel and Sun/Sparc? Yes. That's why I suggested that a platform community would be useful. > (This seems to be the way that > the PowerPC community and projects were done.) No. There's a PPC-only community, and I think that's broken. The fact that there's a project there is great, but the community is too narrow to serve that project well. -- James Carlson, Solaris Networking <james.d.carlson at sun.com> Sun Microsystems / 35 Network Drive 71.232W Vox +1 781 442 2084 MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757 42.496N Fax +1 781 442 1677
