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Sun Microsystems' OpenSPARC initiative is getting a boost with the
creation of an independent governance board and a second Linux
distribution supporting the program.
The new advisory board, announced Oct. 2, will help the OpenSPARC
community set the rules, policies and expectations of the community and
help elect the initial members to what will eventually be the permanent
governance board, said Fadi Azhari, director of marketing and business
development for the OpenSPARC project.
Sun Microsystems' OpenSPARC initiative is getting a boost with the
creation of an independent governance board and a second Linux
distribution supporting the program.
The new advisory board, announced Oct. 2, will help the OpenSPARC
community set the rules, policies and expectations of the community and
help elect the initial members to what will eventually be the permanent
governance board, said Fadi Azhari, director of marketing and business
development for the OpenSPARC project.
"For a community to run itself in an independent and open way, you need a board independent of Sun," Azhari said.
Members of the new board include Insight64 analyst Nathan
Brookwood, Professor Jose Renau of the University of California, Santa
Cruz, and Robert Ober, a fellow in the chief technology officer's
office of LSI Logic.
In addition, the board includes two Sun employees: Senior
Staff Engineer David Weaver and Simon Phipps, chief open source
officer.
The group will serve for a year before the permanent board takes over.
Sun, of Santa Clara, Calif., introduced the OpenSPARC program in February, a move to expand the reach of its multicore UltraSPARC T1 processor.
The chip, formerly code-named "Niagara," offers up to eight cores, each of which can run four instruction threads.
 Click here to read more about Sun open-sourcing its UltraSPARC.
The company initially released the architecture specifications
and hypervisor APIs for the chip. In March, Sun published the hardware
design and the Solaris operating system simulation specifications for
the chip.
The goal is to enable hardware and software developers to build
atop the chip's architecture and build an ecosystem around the
processor.
There have been more than 3,500 OpenSPARC T1 hardware downloads and 2,600 software downloads since March, according to Sun.
Ubuntu Linux in May announced it was supporting OpenSPARC in its GNU/Linux operating system,
which has led to more than 3,000 downloads of the OS onto OpenSPARC. In
addition, there are at least 800 sites running Ubuntu on SPARC,
according to Sun.
Sun is hoping for similar success with the second Linux
distribution supporting the initiative, Gentoo Linux, developed by the
Gentoo Foundation.
The distribution is now supporting the UltraSPARC T1 on the Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers.
In addition, another company, Simply RISC, which includes former
STMicroelectronics engineers, has published the first derivative chip
design based on OpenSPARC, a 64-bit single-core technology aimed at the
embedded market for such devices as PDAs and digital cameras.
The OpenSPARC initiative is part of a greater push by Sun to open-source much of its technology.
It already has open-sourced its Solaris operating system.
It also is similar to IBM's move to open up its Power architecture.
In July, IBM, of Armonk, N.Y., announced that the power.org community group is taking a larger role in the direction of the platform.
Read the original article: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2023306,00.asp
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