Community Overview
The well defined interest of this community is to create an OpenSolaris port that runs on the Power / PowerPC architectures. The versatility and wide acceptance of this architecture sees it implemented in designs from small, low power devices up through 64bit multi-core offerings. Bringing OpenSolaris to such an architecture is what this community is all about.
PPC-Dev Project
The first of what is seen as numerous specific projects under this community has been approved and is open. The PPC-dev project is the first port of OpenSolaris to a non Sparc / x86 based architecture. This work is closely aligned with the community as a whole so the project's discussion list is the same as the community discussion list. Drop by the project page and see the latest!
Design
The one firm design decision the community has made is that the initial port work will be big-endian. Initially the project begins with on a 32-bit ISA since that target hardware is the easiest to come by and was the basis of the original Solaris PPC Edition work. The expectation is a move to a 64-bit kernel port and a subsequent project will be next up.
Consult the PowerPC Document library for technical info and specifics which describe different aspects of building OS for PowerPC based machine. Most of them are gathered here for your convinience. Some of them are CPU/Vendor specific, while others are not.
Hardware
The initial target for the PowerPC port was selected over a year ago. The Genesi Open Desktop Workstation was selected because of its availability to the developer community, its open firmware, its ATI certification as well as open specification. Genesi has worked closely with the community and has been instrumental to its success.