Date: Wed, 06 Jan 1999 23:26:35 -0800 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.cdrom.com> To: sparc@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: All this muttering about support from Sun. Message-ID: <613.915693995@zippy.cdrom.com>
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Hey all, I don't subscribe to this mailing list (I get way too much already) but I did catch some of the discussion on one of the mail2news sites and can only say that I find some of what's been discussed so far to be just a little alarming. I'm also not sure that my role in "rejecting" SME's original offer was all that properly characterized, and the two points are related, so let me see if I can't explain some of the history here and attempt to put things in perspective: First off, I'd like it to be well understood by everyone that when you approach any vendor for FreeBSD-related resources, no matter how big or small, you're essentially now representing the project as far as that vendor is concerned and they're just as likely to assume you're project leadership or something given that most companies are typically pretty confused about how the whole free software world is led and who the key players are (I can't say I'm always all that sure myself). The danger of misrepresenting or overselling the project is a large reason why the original deal with SME was turned down. Even though I myself could probably be said to "lead" the project as much as any individual does, I am still not at all comfortable with the idea of representing the project as a whole when it comes to committing to projects as large as doing and supporting an UltraSPARC port for any reasonable length of time (a port which flares and dies quickly being of no use to either party). Were I to have stood up a year ago and said "OK Sun, I'll take 3 uSPARCs, $20K in direct funding and 100 hours of one of your own developer's time in exchange for a working FreeBSD/uSPARC port", I would have been committing the entire project to far more work and obligation than $20K and 3 machines will frankly buy. It's one thing to do a slap-dash port of FreeBSD to a new architecture just for our own interest and yet another thing entirely to produce a port which works to the satisfaction of a company like Sun, already fussy customers indeed when you realize you're competing to some extent against the Solaris group on their home turf. It was much more likely, given my estimation of our abilities back then time, that we would have simply failed to produce much of anything reasonable in the time allotted (oh, did I also forget to mention that SME wanted the port done in 90 days or less, no-foolin' at all about the schedule?) and the result would have been Sun concluding (quite rightly) that we were a bunch of losers who didn't really know what we were doing. You just can't say you'll do something, impose on some vendor's resources (be it in the form of equipment loans, discounts, cash bribes, *whatever*), and then shrug with a stupid grin on your face when it comes time for you to come up with your end of the deal. We've also shown ourselves to be historically very bad when it comes to doing things to reasonably timely schedules, the DEC Alpha port taking 1.5 years from the moment that DEC gave us the machines to now, where it's actually sort of working. Such a thing would have been completely unacceptable to SME and we just got lucky with Digital in that nobody there really asked us to do the port in any particular timeline, I also getting the machines through a personal contact at DEC which made the whole thing much more low-key and low pressure. So anyway, that's the history up to now and while I'm certainly very glad to see renewed interest in doing a SPARC port again, I hope that everyone involved can keep a similar grip on their perspective when it comes to the more blue-sky aspects of project planning and committments, either direct or implied, with any 3rd party who might be attracted to the idea of having a SPARC port of FreeBSD. It's one thing to say "rah rah, let's do it!" but a very different thing to contemplate FreeBSD/sparc actually being committed to -current and built/released in the same way that FreeBSD/axp and FreeBSD/x86 are; between where you are now and there lie many gates to walk through, filters to satisfy, a core team to convince, you name it! It's also my suggestion that you all start *fist* with the resources already available rather than hoping that Sun will give you a handout in the form of discounts or outright loans/grants, something which will only bring a degree of obligation (nothing comes for free!) into your little project long before any significant amount of code has been written or anything is checked into the tree. That's just not the way it should be done if you're willing to be halfway honest with yourself, and the way I've seen every successful porting effort go to date (observing the NetBSD and Linux folks, among others) has been a small group of 2-3 developers who have the machines and know-how (e.g. NOT novice or beginning people) significantly advancing the port to the point where the other folks can actually jump aboard and start helping with the more mundane stuff. Before that can happen, somebody has to have wrestled with the toolchain issues and a bootstrap environment (NetBSD/Linux/Solaris/whatever), then they need to understand what the architecture specific portions of a FreeBSD system are and get things to the point where an actual FreeBSD kernel is booting single user on an actual SPARC machine of some sort. Once you've reached that milestone, some of the people who don't have pre-existing porting experience can start making more realistic contributions to the port and advance it from the point where it's a technology demonstrator to being an actual "product" in the same way that FreeBSD/x86 is. Not even FreeBSD/alpha is to that point yet, and it has a couple of major coding studs like John Birrell and Doug Rabson working on it. Just something to keep in mind as you contemplate this particular mountain, folks. :-) - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-sparc" in the body of the message
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