Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2006 21:35:30 -0800 From: Joshua Pincus <joshua.pincus@gmail.com> To: freebsd-sparc64@freebsd.org Subject: Porting FreeBSD to Niagara Message-ID: <bc915a050601262135q52ef4bb9ue3b1af9ac31324ec@mail.gmail.com>
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Hi, Sun released three documents today, the UltraSPARC 2005 ISA document, the UltraSPARC T1 extensions to the ISA, and the Hypervisor 1.0 specification. They can be downloaded from http://opensparc.sunsource.net/nonav/opensparct1.htm= l. As a long-time FreeBSD (10 years) user and a Sun employee working on Hyperv= isor, I got really jazzed when I saw what Sun disclosed to the public today. Is there any interest among those on this list to get FreeBSD running on Niagara? The most important aspect of this particular port is that the Hypervisor la= yer virtualizes CPU, Memory, and I/O. This means that all we'd have to do is get things working based on the one published reference architecture to capture all current and future platforms based on sun4v. The amount of work here will be somewhat daunting: 1) Port FreeBSD's sparc64 code to work on sun4v. 2) Ensure a proper SPARCv9 interface to application software is maintained. 3) Produce several leaf and nexus drivers for virtual PCI. 4) Produce a driver for Fire (the PCI-Express) hardware on all shipping sun4v products. 5) Produce drivers for FreeBSD that will allow each logical domain to communicate with other logical domains. 6) Write code to take advantage of the new error and interrupt handling architecture. (Currently optimized for Sun's fault management arch.) 7) Write code to utilize the cryptographic support in sun4v. 8) Integrate a versioning system into FreeBSD for different HV APIs. 8) ...... I have not done any tinkering with the FreeBSD kernel, so I'm a neophyte in that regard. I've also done almost all my kernel work in Solaris. Having said all that, I'm pretty excited about the prospect of booting a FreeBSD partition in a Logical Domain, and I'm a quick study. Is there any interest? How can I help? At the very least, I might be able to come up with some donated equipment towards this effort. Thanks for all your work on the current sparc64 port. Josh Pincus
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