[illumos-Developer] Solaris Future?

["C. Bergström"]

  On 07/27/11 09:06 AM, Haudy Kazemi wrote:
> On 7/26/2011 1:31 PM, Garrett D'Amore wrote:
>> On Tue, 2011-07-26 at 11:21 -0700, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
>>> On 07/26/11 04:17, "C. Bergström" wrote:
>>>> Intel used to provide really good support on Solaris, but I'm not 
>>>> sure if that's
>>>> still the case?
>>> Intel provides that video card support via integrations of the i915 
>>> driver into
>>> the Solaris ON gate, so while they still provide really good support 
>>> for Intel
>>> graphics on Solaris, illumos support is currently stagnating.
>> I'm working with intel, but to be honest, their agreements with Oracle
>> make this difficult.  Apparently their agreements may limit how they are
>> able to release code to other parties.  I blame Oracle.
>>
>>     - Garrett
>
> Perhaps further consideration could be given to making another 
> compatibility or translation layer allowing the use of more FreeBSD or 
> Linux or even Windows (graphics, other) drivers. It has been done for 
> other OSes that suffered a lack of drivers. Linux, FreeBSD, and 
> OpenSolaris have NDISwrapper or Project Evil for network cards; 
> Windows used to support old DOS and Windows drivers.
>
> Solve the problem once (build a robust compatibility layer), and you 
> open up access to a whole collection of drivers without needing 
> further work on each individual driver.
Sounds good, but what exactly would we try to be compatible with
     a) ReactOS/Win.. *lol*
     b) Linux == probably going to hit trolls, unstable interface and 
licensing issues
     c) FreeBSD.... ?  (Are they really in any better shape with 
graphics, interconnects or other important drivers than Solaris now - No 
or not really)

This isn't to say it's not a good idea, but ping the FreeBSD devel list 
and see what feedback you get.  IXsystems cares about FreeBSD as a 
desktop and you may get some traction there..

Speaking for NVIDIA drivers - The binaries from NV are in good shape 
across Lin/FBSD/Sol, but the open source drivers Nouveau/PSCNV are 
another story.  While in our driver we've kicked out a large majority of 
the deps on TTM and other linux crap it's still only usable for 
compute.  (Graphics/3D is a whole other set of problems)

Sorry, but the only way out of this corner is get the hw specs and 
write/fix/update the drivers.  For specs there's either a clean-room 
approach by looking at existing driver code or getting them directly 
from the vendors.  If you can't write code there's other ways to contribute

install/use/file bugs/create docs or help promote the current advantages