System News for Sun Users - The Blog

Gives Communities Opportunity to Contribute to Processors’ Evolution

The release of OpenSPARC T1 version 1.7 is announced in the weblog of Durgam Vahia, Engineering and Partnership Development Manager in the OpenSPARC group at Sun, who writes, “… with this release, [the] community can port a truly multi-core, multi-thread 64-bit commercial processor design on FPGAs.” A download of OpenSPARC T2 is also now available. He adds that OpenSPARC now supports two different FPGA boards of different capacities.

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The software specification for the UltraSPARC virtual machine environment, which contains the API specification for Logical Domains (LDoms) and the SPARC hypervisor, has been published.

Ashley Saulsbury, who produced this detailed document, describes it as “…an overview of how the whole virtualization environment hangs together, followed by detailed descriptions of each of the interfaces available to an operating system running in a virtual machine (”Logical Domain”). This includes virtual devices such as disk and networking.”

She adds, “If you’re serious about hacking a kernel for a sun4v UltraSPARC machine, be it Linux, FreeBSD or OpenSolaris, or even if your just curious you’ll wan to take a look at this.”

Currently the Hypervisor API document is available from the OpenSPARC Website and as a local copy.

OpenSPARC T1 1.6 Final Release

OpenSPARC T1 is the open source version of the UltraSPARC T1 processor. The UltraSPARC T1 processor with CoolThreads technology is the highest-throughput and most eco-responsible processor ever created. Download.

OpenSPARC T2 1.0 Final Release

OpenSPARC T2 is the open source version of the UltraSPARC T2 processor. The UltraSPARC T2 processor is the industry’s first “system on a chip”, packing the most cores and threads of any general-purpose processor available, and integrating all the key functions of a server on a single chip: computing, networking, security, and input/output (I/O). Download

Learn more about these new releases by visiting the OpenSPARC Website.