[rescue] Details on "Free Ultra 20" program

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Sun, 3 Jul 2005, Mike Meredith wrote:

> And how much commercial software actually uses VIS and other
> extensions without an unextended version ?

I'd suspect anything specifically targeted for UltraSPARC.  It's a
tremendous speed boost for anything that does image processing.

> In Sun's words: "This complies with the SPARC International V9 Level 2
> specification and provides binary compatibility with all Sun
> UltraSPARC products. PRIMEPOWER systems from the PRIMEPOWER 250 to the
> PRIMEPOWER 2500 currently run Solaris 8 (2/02), Solaris 9 (9/03).
> Application binaries developed using standard Solaris 8 and Solaris 9
> APIs and ABIs will run on PRIMEPOWER systems unmodified".

One has to wonder what "standard" means.

   [jp at hythloth:/tmp]$ $CC -o hello hello.c
   [jp at hythloth:/tmp]$ file hello
   hello:          ELF 64-bit MSB executable SPARCV9 Version 1,
    dynamically linked, not stripped
   [jp at hythloth:/tmp]$ $CC -xarch=v9a -o hello hello.c
   [jp at hythloth:/tmp]$ file hello
   hello:          ELF 64-bit MSB executable SPARCV9 Version 1,
    UltraSPARC1 Extensions Required, dynamically linked, not stripped

There's certainly nothing nonstandard there that isn't mentioned in the
cc man page.  The man page warns you that -xarch=v9a generates code
which will "run only on a SPARC V9a compatible platform", but it
neglects to mention that SPARC64 is one of them.

> Of course Solaris 10 isn't mentioned, so there could be some problems
> there.

I doubt it.  I've not run Solaris 10 yet, but I'd be surprised if most
of the binaries weren't still 32-bit.  One just doesn't really need a
64-bit cat or ls. :)

-- 
Jonathan Patschke ) "Beatniks and politics, nothing is new.
Elgin, TX        (   A yardstick for lunatics: one point of view."
USA               )  --Strawberry Alarm Clock, "Incense and Peppermints"