Not dead, just on hold. Stay tuned. On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 11:25 PM, Jennifer Pioch <piochjennifer at googlemail.com> wrote: > > On 5/2/08, Dennis Clarke <blastwave at gmail.com> wrote: > > On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 12:30 PM, <ewood at izoom.net> wrote: > > > Would it not be a whole lot better to simply start making it work on G4 > > > and G5 Macs right now? Then there'd at least be a working OS to port to > > > something like POWER6 later on. > > > > The *whole* idea from the very beginning has been to get some sort of > > port up and running to a point where we have a serial console and a > > shell and some tools. That would be enough to allow community people > > to keep on working. > > > > This process has been in a terrible state for years. Years my friend. > > > > We started with a community project with little or resources at > Blastwave.org > > > > That then drew the attention of some people who brought in some heavy > > hitting talent and $money$ into the project all working on a platform > > that no one would ever be able to get again. The Open Desktop > > Workstation from Genesi based on the PegasosPPC motherboard > > http://www.pegasosppc.com/pegasos.php > > > > I have one of those little PPC processor daughterboards here now. The > > motherboard stopped working a while ago and there will never be a > > replacement because you can not get one unless you make it yourself. > > So we have had the big time blow out of money and with the help of a > > rock star consultant named Guy Shaw we have a pile of code that will > > boot up to a point and then .. well there we are. Stuck with code that > > is extremely locked to a platform which had great firmware and no one > > can ever get. The EFIKA is not the same thing but it has nice > > firmware also. Just FYI. > > > > To go forwards, again, we would need hardware that can be found > > anywhere. Better yet, we would need hardware with a future. I am > > thinking POWER6 gear from IBM of course. We do not want to go there > > because we would need IBM engineers and millions of dollars in R&D > > money to do the job. The rumour is that it took rocket science or > > something more tricky, actual computer science, to get Linux working > > halfway decent on the POWER6 gear because of serious time > > synchronization issues in the kernel for multiple threads of execution > > all running after the same blocks of memory. Please go look into the > > TSO ( total store order memory consistency issues ) with references > > like "Memory Consistency and Process Coordination for SPARC > > Multiprocessors" : > > > > Memory Consistency and Process Coordination for SPARC Multiprocessors > > Book Series Lecture Notes in Computer Science > > Publisher Springer Berlin / Heidelberg > > ISSN 0302-9743 (Print) 1611-3349 (Online) > > > > Also go looking for a paper by Arvind ( a one name guy? ) MIT CSAIL > > and Jan-Willem Maessen ( Sun Labs ) about Memory Model and Instruction > > Reordering + Store Atomicity and then more recent stuff at OpenSPARC > > such as : > > > > TSOtool: A Program for Verifying Memory Systems Using the Memory > > Consistency Model > > Written by Sudheendra Hangal, Durgam Vahia, Chaiyasit Manovit, > > Juin-Yeu Joseph Lu and Sridhar Narayanan > > IEEE Int. Symp. on Computer Architecture (ISCA04), 2004. > > > > Really, a machine with a very well understood cache process and > > detailed hardware docs is needed. > > Good luck with that from the Apple stuff. > > > > So the IBM stuff looks better but you need IBM to play along. > > > > Or we get some money together and build some ODW units ourselves. > > > > Either way, my friend, can you spare a million dollars ? > > It sounds very much that the powerpc port is dead, is it? > > Jenny > -- > Jennifer Pioch, Uni Frankfurt > > > _______________________________________________ > powerpc-discuss mailing list > powerpc-discuss at opensolaris.org >
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