OpenBSD Journal

UltraSparc III documentation

Contributed by jose on from the call-for-help dept.

margarida sends us this call for help:
"Looks like SUN keeps on having preferences although it keeps constantly pestering Microsoft about not beeing open. They aren't better.. This message has been posted to the misc@openbsd.org mailing list by Theo:


"We've been trying to get ultrasparc 3 documentation for 
quite some time.  The documentation Sun provides on the net
is not sufficient to write an operating system, and Sun 
admits it.  Various developers have been trying, and it is 
CLEAR we need more documentation.

We've been trying for more than a year to get Sun to open 
up.  We've talked to about 20 people who work there.  
Nothing has progressed.

We have documentation for basically every 32 or 64 -bit 
processor made, except for this one.  (For ethernet cards, 
we have documentation for everything except 2, for RAID 
cards we have documentation for everything except 2, for 
scsi cards we have documentation for everything).

Previously, our user community's assistance in contacting 
Adaptec personal caused Adaptec to have a rapid change in 
heart regarding scsi chipset documentation. I do not feel 
this is harrassment, since you are letting your vendor know 
you want them to support you.  Adaptec initially got very 
upset, but I have heard reports that the person who had 
slacked in getting us documentation nearly got fired.

Regarding Sun, we've tried very hard to find the person who 
is responsible in this regard, and it is clear that we have 
found who is responsible; in a voice call 3 weeks ago he 
assured me that he was the person who would change this if 
he could, and that I need not try finding anyone else.  
Other employees also pointed me up the chain to him.

Ahmad Zandi
(408) 616-5783
ahmad.zandi@sun.com

Please give him a call and let him know that you want us to 
have documentation.

I am going to be talking up some press people on this issue. 
The level of stonewalling we have received on this is just 
so arrogant, it is just so offensive.  If Sun says they are 
open, they need to start acting it."


If any of you can help, this would greatly improve support on the Ultrasparc platform. If you haven't seen OpenBSD on the Sparc64 platform, you're missing out. If you do contact Sun, please be cordial and make a good impression about the OpenBSD project. No need to give them reason to not share documentation.

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By Anonymous Coward () on

    Given that Sun has recently started SELLING servers running Linux, this can't be a coincedence. They probably want to give Linux and Solaris a jump over any other OS's.

    If Sun says they don't have decent documentation about the US3's, they are flat out *lying* to you. They can't port Solaris without this documentation. If this situation keeps up, I'm going to sell my Sun stock (at a loss, I bought it at $13/share and it's really gone into the shitter since then).

  2. By grey () on

    Well, I just got through writing a nice letter to Ahmad. Please remember, that just because we are pushing to get Sun to wake up, doesn't mean that we should cease being polite.

    (Takes this opportunity to remind folks about ye olde Monkey FUQ on how to be an OpenBSD advocate [even if it was ripped from a Linux piece]).

    http://monkey.org/openbsd/advocating-openbsd.html

    Remember, when campaigning - it's often most effective simply to show a lot of voices and concern, but that doesn't mean you need to be rude. Hopefully we can give them a wake up call the nice way first. I'm sure we'll hear from Theo et al if Sun still isn't getting the point. Until then, please act responsibly if you contact Ahmad, even if you're not a developer, when you call up on behalf of OpenBSD you should put your best foot forward.

  3. By Anonymous Coward () on

    I'm running Aurora Linux on my Blade 100 (a port of Red Hat 7.3 to Sparc64) and it runs great. What can't be figure out from reverse engineering or checking out the Linux source code? Or is that too uncool?

  4. By Anonymous Coward () on

    i got a response from Danese Cooper within a couple hours of emailing her and Ahmad. the response was somewhat similar to http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=openbsd-misc&m=103828815529517&w=2 (in terms of the cordiality! my mail was a little less... Blunt than Martin's).

    anyways, it looks quite hopeful that the proper people will get the proper docs - maybe i'll get my boss to order me a Blade 2000 tomorrow!

    oh, wait, they cost $7500 minimum.

  5. By Anonymous Coward () on

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