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PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

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Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

#31

Post by linksnapzz »

azalemeth wrote: post #2

Posts like this, projects like these, and people like Neozeed are part of why I think the GNU project fundamentally is brilliant. Getting GCC running on barely-produced prototype hardware system, on an ancient version of Solaris which itself was a particular pain to install, whilst entertaining and informing the reader about the history of the PowerPC migration circa 1994, is no mean feat. What were the desirable/sex…

There was a trick I saw once, where you could use the editing commands in openboot, plus the fact that it could read UFS volumes, to find the offset of the root entry in the on-disk shadow file and zero or change it if you'd lost the password.

When I was in school, the astronomy dept. used a remote telescope in Wyoming. I guess there was dial-up to send commands to open the dome if the weather looked nice, to send coordinates to aim the scope, and to set exposure times for the CCD. The connectivity wasn't enough to download lots of data, so there was a data collection box; a 16mhz Sun IPC workstation in the "lunchbox" form factor, roughly 10"x10"x5". Someone had written a program in OpenFirmware Forth to read data off of whatever storage was on the scope via the IPC's serial port, and write it to the internal SCSI drive. After every observing run, a collaborator would put the IPC in a backpack and jog it up the mountain, so it could be plugged into a scope & terminal, and run the collector code to pull the data. A friend's first real job was maintaining that forth code; he still has nightmares about it.

Having system firmware that is that flexible is pretty nice, but really hard to write marketing copy for.

Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

#32

Post by spijdar »

korethr wrote: post #29

And here I was, thinking I was a damned fool for wanting to port Illumos to run on Power 9. Well, okay, I probably am still a damned fool for wanting such, but knowing that the Solaris codebase has run on Power before gives me hope that it might actually be possible.

There were ultimately two ports of Solaris to PowerPC, this early one and a third party port of OpenSolaris/Solaris 10 to PowerPC. The latter, called Project Polaris, can be found in source form online https://github.com/andreiw/polaris

Getting this running on ppc64(le) would be no small undertaking, but hey.

Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

#33

Post by apaprocki »

kev009 wrote: post #12
neilv wrote: post #7

If you get access to an IBM RS/6000, another thing to play around with on it is the original AIX operating system. Imagine a Unix that got an IBM working-over. When the RS/6000 workstations first came out, AIX was a big contrast to the more seat-of-pants workstation Unix of SunOS 4 (this was before Solaris 2). Some of the AIX changes weren't only enterprise-y server management OS abstractions, but fun: AIX included a…

I am always surprised by the negativity that surrounds AIX by layperson UNIX users. AIX actually remains ultramodern when the full timeline is taken into account of remaining UNIX-like OSes like Linux, Solaris, and the BSDs. There's a reason it is one of the few remaining commercial UNIX, and that's because it is good and runs on the best hardware for vertical scaling. Scaling on large SMPs is not an easy task for OS…

SAs have their own likes/dislikes. From an end-user dev point of view AIX is pretty harsh. XCOFF binaries mean almost no tooling works with them. It’s 2020 and IBM finally came around to adopting LLVM/Clang to the platform. There’s lots of strange deployment warts like no $ORIGIN support, everything is shared/PIC but you have none of the ELF naming support, shared libraries stay in a system-wide library cache even after the processes exit (i.e. updating the file on disk and starting a new process will not guarantee it is used), and the list goes on and on. It takes a huge amount of effort to keep all the usual open-source packages running there.

You have to do the open-source work, though, because the vendor side is as close to abandonware as you can come. The OS is basically not touched unless they have to. For example, they gave up trying to actually fix their system headers to have C++ include guards, so they just hacked the compiler to extern C all system headers —- a terrible hack that GCC actually adopted as well to stay compatible. There’s no versioning of user-space library additions or changes, so you can’t easily make code forwards/backwards compat in the preprocessor. They gave up trying to follow modern C++ and pulled in a Clang front-end. User binaries remained broken for years until anyone complained about them. There are people there doing the bare minimum to add support for some new POSIX interface that comes out, but the headers are not “clean” in the same way that the Solaris ones are. Solaris headers and man pages are some of the best I’ve ever seen. They could constantly improve the system, but they don’t. They do what customers ask for and no more.

It might be great at taking some Fortran simulation and cranking the nodes up, but it’s not great at coming anywhere close to competing with Linux for general computing use.

Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

#34

Post by tannhaeuser »

kev009 wrote: post #12
neilv wrote: post #7

If you get access to an IBM RS/6000, another thing to play around with on it is the original AIX operating system. Imagine a Unix that got an IBM working-over. When the RS/6000 workstations first came out, AIX was a big contrast to the more seat-of-pants workstation Unix of SunOS 4 (this was before Solaris 2). Some of the AIX changes weren't only enterprise-y server management OS abstractions, but fun: AIX included a…

I am always surprised by the negativity that surrounds AIX by layperson UNIX users. AIX actually remains ultramodern when the full timeline is taken into account of remaining UNIX-like OSes like Linux, Solaris, and the BSDs. There's a reason it is one of the few remaining commercial UNIX, and that's because it is good and runs on the best hardware for vertical scaling. Scaling on large SMPs is not an easy task for OS…

Yet I managed to trash ODM on our RS/6000 cluster in 1992 or so, so that the metadata AIX had was inconsistent with the quorum of binary metadata stored on special partition tables on disks. Had to low-level format the disks and start over (the 857MB SCSI disks about as expensive as a compact car).

What's perhaps unknown to many is that the Linux volume manager was/is a straight clone of AIX's, with IBM terminology like logical volumes, physical volumes, and so on (the terminology itself being an extension of IBM's naming scheme on z/OS aka MVS, eg "logical/physical partition" for VMs with reserved channel bandwidth etc). Whereas FreeBSD's vinum was a clone of Veritas (in vinum veritas).

Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

#35

Post by tal8d »

bcantrill wrote: post #24

So, this post (which I loved) brings back a lot of memories for me (having joined Solaris Kernel Development in 1996, when ppc was still a thing -- if barely). If I may, a quick anecdote: back in MPK17 (now Facebook!) my office was next to that of Mike Sullivan, who was one of the lead engineers on on297, our internal name for Solaris 2.6. As part of his nature of running latest bits on everything around him, Mike ha…

ppc is still a thing, my project computer is a power9. The only reason it isn't my daily driver is because I can't help but tinker with it. Being able to rewrite the supervisor chip code in order to get that fan curve just so, and having the support of unabridged and NDA free documentation - instead of grinding through reverse engineering... feels good. I highly recommend it, just stick to known working GPUs, the mmu actually does its job.

Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

#36

Post by tannhaeuser »

neilv wrote: post #7

If you get access to an IBM RS/6000, another thing to play around with on it is the original AIX operating system. Imagine a Unix that got an IBM working-over. When the RS/6000 workstations first came out, AIX was a big contrast to the more seat-of-pants workstation Unix of SunOS 4 (this was before Solaris 2). Some of the AIX changes weren't only enterprise-y server management OS abstractions, but fun: AIX included a…

Hypertext on IBM systems is no surprise - the precursor to SGML, on which HTML is based, was introduced on z/OS aka MVS, and to this date is available as SCRIPT/VS on IBM mainframes. Though IBM sold off their printer business over a decade ago and discontinued AFP printing so customers (insurers, banks) went looking for alternatives. The telephone-book sized AIX documentation in printed form was also excellent; I guess (but I'm not sure) it was produced using Iddoc or DITA (also SGML-based cross-publishing tools by IBM).

Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

#37

Post by tannhaeuser »

bcantrill wrote: post #24

So, this post (which I loved) brings back a lot of memories for me (having joined Solaris Kernel Development in 1996, when ppc was still a thing -- if barely). If I may, a quick anecdote: back in MPK17 (now Facebook!) my office was next to that of Mike Sullivan, who was one of the lead engineers on on297, our internal name for Solaris 2.6. As part of his nature of running latest bits on everything around him, Mike ha…

PPC in 1996 was not "barely a thing". IBM could win over Apple, and later Sony for the "Cell" CPU on PS/3, and Motorola sold to automobile and other embedded apps in quantities. It's just that sometime around 2005-2010 or so the investment into new competitive fabs became so astronomically high that it just wasn't good business anymore for CPUs produced in quantities below x86 and ARM.

Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

#39

Post by bcantrill »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #37
bcantrill wrote: post #24

So, this post (which I loved) brings back a lot of memories for me (having joined Solaris Kernel Development in 1996, when ppc was still a thing -- if barely). If I may, a quick anecdote: back in MPK17 (now Facebook!) my office was next to that of Mike Sullivan, who was one of the lead engineers on on297, our internal name for Solaris 2.6. As part of his nature of running latest bits on everything around him, Mike ha…

PPC in 1996 was not "barely a thing". IBM could win over Apple, and later Sony for the "Cell" CPU on PS/3, and Motorola sold to automobile and other embedded apps in quantities. It's just that sometime around 2005-2010 or so the investment into new competitive fabs became so astronomically high that it just wasn't good business anymore for CPUs produced in quantities below x86 and ARM.

To clarify: I meant "ppc" as a subdirectory under usr/src/uts -- that is, the PowerPC port in Solaris -- not PowerPC itself...

Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

#40

Post by aryonoco »

tal8d wrote: post #35
bcantrill wrote: post #24

So, this post (which I loved) brings back a lot of memories for me (having joined Solaris Kernel Development in 1996, when ppc was still a thing -- if barely). If I may, a quick anecdote: back in MPK17 (now Facebook!) my office was next to that of Mike Sullivan, who was one of the lead engineers on on297, our internal name for Solaris 2.6. As part of his nature of running latest bits on everything around him, Mike ha…

ppc is still a thing, my project computer is a power9. The only reason it isn't my daily driver is because I can't help but tinker with it. Being able to rewrite the supervisor chip code in order to get that fan curve just so, and having the support of unabridged and NDA free documentation - instead of grinding through reverse engineering... feels good. I highly recommend it, just stick to known working GPUs, the mmu…

PPC is/was different from POWER. Technically related but they diverged enough that it was a different ISA for all intents and purposes
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