AMD64 port merged into Solaris 10

As someone with a few Sun v20z dual Opteron boxes kicking about, I was pretty excited to hear straight from the source that the AMD64 port has been integrated into Solaris 10.

This is Joe Bonasera. I’ve been a software engineer in the Solaris Kernel Group for 4 1/2 years working mostly on core Virtual Memory support. My team’s major project for Solaris 10 integrated this week, so I have some extra time available to initiate a weblog.

As Eric Schrock points out, we probably won’t see it in the next Solaris Express release, but it will be here soon, certainly before Solaris 10 goes gold. I’m pretty excited to try it out.

I’m even more excited to see what Sun is going to do for their first “real” Opteron boxes (the v20z and v40z are simply OEM’ed). The v20z’s are great and all, but they don’t feel particularly “Sun”, if ya know what I mean. The remote management is pretty slick, and takes some of the pain out of dealing with the PC BIOS. The hard drive canisters are crap. I’ve broken 3 levers already. We have the reference quad Opteron box that the v40z is based on, and I hate the chassis. The rails suck, it’s a bitch to get in and out of the rack for service, and well, the stupid fault light is always on for no reason. Sun could really produce something significantly better in this space. Opteron blades would be swell too, while they’re at it.

Make no mistake though. They run like the bejezus. A lot of Sun customers will be very surprised with how fast Solaris 10 (or Linux) on Opteron will be compard to their current “entry level” Ultrasparc boxes.

Fancy cases aside, what I’d really like to see Sun tackle is the whole BIOS issue on their Opteron boxes. I’d kill for OpenBoot instead of PC BIOS crap. Or at least some way of flipping the box into an OpenBoot style bootup, but still have a traditional BIOS option if you wanted to install Windows (the horror!) on it. Combined with the web based RMI stuff that’s already in the v20z, some of the traditional ALOM/SSC stuff in the sparc lineup, and you’d have a compelling advantage over, say, IBM’s Opteron machines. I mean, if my Powerbook *laptop* can have OpenBoot, why the hell can’t my AMD64 servers? Can you imagine how much easier it would make maintaining fleets of these boxes in clusters? Linux Networx is certainly demonstrating that there’s a market for it with their Linux BIOS enabled hardware. How ’bout it Sun? Please?