[OpenIndiana-discuss] ARM chips V9 oi

[Richard L. Hamilton]

Back in the OpenSolaris days, there was an experimental port to the NEC NaviEngine 1, an ARM11 (32-bit) SoC for car nav and the like. No idea if anyone has ever attempted to extend that into the 64 bit realm. Open source compilers exist, which could probably be configured to generate ELF object and executables, so the tools needed aren't a show-stopper, but it might take nearly as much work to add 64-bit as it would to port to a totally different architecture; although existing 64-bit with 32-bit user land compatibility would probably show a lot of how it could be done and a fair bit of the existing code might, a lot of low-level stuff mostly in the kernel (and how one calls the kernel) would vary; definitely anything in assembler, but also some C code that's particularly intimate with the hardware, and that's not even counting drivers.

The articles about that port even then mentioned that there likely wouldn't be much use for it outside of the target device, since most ARM on general purpose systems was then low-end desktop/laptop use, and OpenSolaris in general fell WAY short of say Ubuntu in number of apps ported and built.

One thing in a sick way is almost good: Oracle apparently laid off so much of the Solaris kernel and driver talent that far more of it is probably elsewhere than in Oracle. If there was an incentive for that talent to do the job, it could happen, but I don't know who or what might provide the incentive.

> On May 6, 2021, at 16:27, private mail openbabel <openbabel at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Dear All,
> 
> This is a general question.The announcement of ARM v9 architecture has
> questioned the direction of chip technologies. Will Oi be able (as far
> as we can tell) to run on the next generation ARM architecture for
> server and workstations ?
> 
> Regards
> 
> 
> Robert Jones
> 
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