Emerging Platforms Community Charter
The Emerging Platforms community is home to projects targeting platforms that have not historically been targets for OpenSolaris.
This includes ports of OpenSolaris to new platforms and to other processors as well as use of OpenSolaris in embedded environments.
Statement of Purpose
As OpenSolaris has matured, interest has grown in porting it to a variety of hardware platforms and processors. In addition to the efforts of the existing "PowerPC" Community (which will going forward become the "ppc-dev" project within the Emerging Platforms Community,) there are current or investigational efforts to port OpenSolaris to the IBM System Z mainframe (as a guest OS) and to other processor architectures, and there has been interest in supporting OpenSolaris on various platforms that are related to but will not be directly supported by normal Solaris releases (e.g. AMD and Intel SoC-based embedded systems.)
In addition, various porting projects inside and outside of Sun have uncovered issues that would be well addressed as projects under the proposed Community umbrella, such as toolchain issues (GNU vs. Sun Studio compiler differences, cross-compiling and cross-linking issues, etc.), assumptions made by current "common" OpenSolaris code that are actually hardware-dependent (e.g. that hardware always provides an atomic 64-bit compare and swap instruction) and issues surrounding the use of OpenSolaris for embedded systems (e.g. shortening boot time and reducing OpenSolaris' initial memory footprint and the number of packages it provides.) This area of investigation may also include projects to address issues that currently restrict OpenSolaris' portability, such as its reliance upon operation on a processor providing a strong memory ordering model.
Current Projects
- ppc-dev
The ppc-dev project encompasses a port of OpenSolaris to the PowerPC architecture and/or POWER architectures. Releases under this project have sometimes gone under the name of "Polaris." - System z
The System z project encompasses a port of OpenSolaris to the IBM System z mainframe as a guest OS. This project has also gone by the name of "Sirius" in the past.