Sun + Intel + OpenSolaris + 2 Years = The Year of Core

By David Stewart (Intel) (138 posts) on January 22, 2009 at 11:02 pm

Today is the second anniversary of the Sun and Intel joint agreement to optimize the Solaris operating system for Intel Xeon processors. Like last year, when I wrote this summary of our work, I decided to recap where we are to date.

Like last year’s edition, this is pretty much off the top of my head.


And, as if all that were not enough, we have tried to promote the overall OpenSolaris open source project, through a series of 5-minute videos on various technology topics with OpenSolaris, done blogging, and participated in the OpenSolaris developers’ summits. We have also spoken at a number of the Sun Tech Days worldwide, to share the good news about our work.

Looking forward to 2009, the team is hard at work in a number of areas: preparing for the next generation of Intel servers, working ahead at enabling features in future roadmap processors, further developing in our key areas of power, virtualization, performance and reliability. And of course, a raft of new device drivers.

I still feel like this project has been some of the most fulfilling work I have done. I work with a great Intel team and great partners at Sun and in the OpenSolaris community. Thanks all to making this a really fun job!

Categories: Open Source, Threading Building Blocks, Virtualization

Comments (12)

January 22, 2009 11:33 PM PST


Jim Grisanzio		 Congrats! Seems the project is working out quite well for the companies and the communities!
January 23, 2009 6:07 AM PST


Vasileios Anagnostopoulos		 I believe SUN's relationship with Intel brings an amazing desktop product rivaling MacOSX. I definitely use it and I am very satisfied. I wish you good luck and tighter co-operation. Definitely Opensolaris on Intel HW is for me the Intel product I have a reason to spend money on. I hope in the future you can sell the dual-core atom mobos with an Opensolaris DVD. I am not very interested in server work but for my Computer Vison tasks SUN/Intel is a no-brainer.
January 23, 2009 7:50 PM PST


Shawn Walker		 I just built a new system, and I chose Intel specifically because of their commitment to OpenSolaris and price/performance ratio. I have been very happy with my Intel-based systems every since I switched from AMD-based ones; you've certainly made a believer out of me.
January 24, 2009 3:47 AM PST


Thorleif Wiik		 Great job ! Hope to see optimizations for Nehalem !
January 24, 2009 8:26 AM PST


Robert Johnson		 I knew there something about the way Solaris 8, 9, 10 and all the derivatives performed in comparison to AMD based machines. I am thinking, Intel did work way before this so that Solaris performs almost as fast as does on SPARC. My next hardware upgrade, I am going to get an Intel since Solaris 5/08 runs extremely well on my Pentium 4 3.0G 32bit machine.
February 22, 2009 10:34 PM PST


James		 Congrats!

One question....
"Our Threading Building Blocks team added a port of the TBB product to Solaris, bringing help to C++ programmers to add threading to their code."

I know it's not an Intel priority but I do need to know for protability reasons if this also will be ported to Sparc.

The release notes for 20080709 open-source release state that it was ported to Sparc but I'm fairly sure they meant to write Solaris for ia32 and em64t.

"20080709 open-source release

Changes (w.r.t. previous open-source release):

- operator=() was added to the tbb_thread class according to the current
working draft for std::thread
- recognizing SPARC* based systems in makefiles for Linux* and Sun Solaris*

Bugs fixed:

- 127 - concurrent_hash_map::range fixed to split correctly.

Open-source contributions integrated:

- fix_set_midpoint.diff by jyasskin
- SPARC* support in makefiles by Raf Schietekat"

ps: I'm trying to post this on the forums but there are problems logging in at the moment. I've submitted a report to tech support.
February 22, 2009 11:55 PM PST


Dave Stewart		 James - I will check around to see if there is an owner for the SPARC support.

It may be that Sun is owning this directly. Since TBB is open source, it might make more sense for them to own the SPARC support rather than us.
February 23, 2009 12:29 AM PST


James		 Thanks David,

Much appreciated.

James
February 24, 2009 11:12 AM PST

Robert Reed (Intel)
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Brown Belt
 Raf Shietekat, one of TBB's regular community contributors, has provided some makefile hooks to recognize several non-Intel architectures including Sparc and set appropriate compiler flags, but so far that's the extent of Sparc support that's been released. Some additional atomic and fencing support may be a part of Raf's atomic support contributions, which are under consideration for a future release, but the only TBB libraries Intel distributes for Solaris are for the Intel IA-32 and Intel® 64 architectures. Currently there are no plans to offer support for Sparc at the level provided for Solaris on Intel architecture.
February 24, 2009 8:28 PM PST


James		 I've seen his contributions in the makefiles to allow compilation in Solaris for ia32 and Intel 64 architectures but not for SPARC processors.

Did Raf provide a patch for SPARC to Solaris or has he made it available online to all?
February 25, 2009 12:50 AM PST

Raf Schietekat
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 See thread "TBB on Solaris for SPARC"
February 25, 2009 12:52 AM PST

Raf Schietekat
Total Points:
16,765
Status Points:
16,765
Black Belt
 New attempt for the URL: http://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/intel-threading-build..... pic/63880/

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