The initial design for what became Sun`s first Unix workstation, the Sun-1, was conceived by Andy Bechtolsheim when he was a graduate student at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. He originally designed the SUN workstation for the Stanford University Network communications project as a personal CAD workstation. It was designed as a 3M computer: 1 MIPS, 1 Megabyte and 1 Megapixel. It was designed around the Motorola 68000 processor with an advanced Memory management unit (MMU) to support the Unix operating system with virtual memory support. He built the first ones from spare parts obtained from Stanford’s Department of Computer Science and Silicon Valley supply houses.

On February 24, 1982 Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, and Scott McNealy, all Stanford graduate students, founded ”Sun Microsystems”. Bill Joy of Berkeley, a primary developer of BSD, joined soon after and is counted as one of the original founders. The Sun name is derived from the initials of the Stanford University Network. Sun was profitable from its first quarter in July 1982.

Sun’s initial public offering was in 1986 under the stock symbol ”SUNW”, for ”Sun Workstations” (later ”Sun Worldwide”). The symbol was changed in 2007 to ”JAVA”; Sun stated that the brand awareness associated with its Java platform better represented the company’s current strategy.

Sun’s logo, which features four interleaved copies of the word ”sun”, was designed by professor Vaughan Pratt, also of Stanford University. The initial version of the logo was orange and had the sides oriented horizontally and vertically, but it was subsequently redesigned so as to appear to stand on one corner and the color changed to purple.

Ingrid Van Den Hoogen (Sun’s Senior Vice President of Corporate Marketing) asked Sun’s staff from around the world to share some of their favorite anecdotes about their experiences at Sun. [http://www.thenetworkisthecomputer.com/ A Tribute to Sun Microsystems], containing videos, stories, and photographs from 27 years at Sun, was made available on September 2, 2009.

The “Bubble” and its aftermath

During the dot-com bubble, Sun experienced dramatic growth in revenue, profits, share price, and expenses. Some part of this was due to genuine expansion of demand for web-serving cycles, but another part was synthetic, fueled by venture capital-funded startups building out large, expensive Sun-centric server presences in the expectation of high traffic levels that never materialized. The share price in that particular period increased to a level that even the company’s executives were hard-pressed to defend. In response to this business growth, Sun expanded aggressively in all areas: head-count, infrastructure, and office space.

The bursting of the bubble in 2001 was the start of a period of poor business performance for Sun.

Sales dropped as the growth of online business failed to meet predictions. As online businesses closed and their assets were auctioned off, a large amount of used high-end Sun hardware was available very cheaply. This hurt Sun’s business as it relied a great deal on hardware sales.

Multiple quarters of substantial losses and declining revenues have led to repeated rounds of layoffs,

executive departures, and expense-reduction efforts. In December 2001 the share price dropped to the 1998 pre-bubble level of about one hundred dollars or so and then kept going, a rapid fall even by the standards of the high-tech sector at that time. The stock dipped below 10 dollars a year later, one-tenth of its 1990 value, then quickly bounced back to 20. In mid-2004, Sun ceased manufacturing operations at their Newark, California facility and consolidated all of the company’s US-based manufacturing operations to their Hillsboro, Oregon facility, as part of continued cost-reduction efforts.

In 2006 Sun closed the Newark campus completely and moved 2,300 staff to its other campuses in the area.

Many companies (like E-Trade and Google) chose to build Web applications based on large numbers of the less expensive PC-class x86-architecture servers running Linux, rather than a smaller number of high-end Sun servers. They reported benefits including substantially lower expenses (both acquisition and maintenance) and greater flexibility based on the use of open-source software. Sun responded to this in several ways, including introducing its own lines of x86-based servers to compete directly in that market, re-launching development of Solaris on the x86 platform and releasing the open-source OpenSolaris to drive interest in using Solaris, and coming out with lower cost horizontally-scaled SPARC systems.

Post-crash focus

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Sun Microsystems, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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AMD chipsets

Before the launch of Athlon 64 processors in 2003, AMD designed chipsets for their processors spanning the K6 and K7 processor generations. The chipsets include the AMD-640, AMD-751 and the AMD-761 chipsets. The situation changed in 2003 with the release of Athlon 64 processors, and AMD chose not to further design its own chipsets for its desktop processors while opening the desktop platform to allow other firms to design chipsets. This is the “Open Platform ATI, VIA and SiS developing their own chipset for Athlon 64 processors and later Athlon 64 X2 and Athlon 64 FX processors, including the Quad FX platform chipset from Nvidia.

The initiative went further with the release of Opteron server processors as AMD stopped the design of server chipsets in 2004 after releasing the AMD-8111 chipset, and again opened the server platform for firms to develop chipsets for Opteron processors. As of today, Nvidia and Broadcom are the sole designing firms of server chipsets for Opteron processors.

As the company completed the acquisition of ATI Technologies in 2006, the firm gained the ATI design team for chipsets which previously designed the Radeon Xpress 200 and the Radeon Xpress 3200 chipsets. AMD then renamed the chipsets for AMD processors under AMD branding (for instance, the CrossFire Xpress 3200 chipset was renamed as AMD 580X CrossFire chipset). In February 2007, AMD announced the first AMD-branded chipset since 2004 with the release of the AMD 690G chipset (previously under the development codename ”RS690”), targeted at mainstream IGP computing. It was the industry’s first to implement a HDMI 1.2 port on motherboards, shipping for more than a million units. While ATI had aimed at releasing an Intel IGP chipset, the plan was scrapped and the inventories of Radeon Xpress 1250 (codenamed ”RS600”, sold under ATI brand) was sold to two OEMs, Abit and AsRock. Although AMD states the firm will still produce Intel chipsets, Intel had not granted the license of FSB to ATI.

On November 15, 2007, AMD has announced a new chipset series portfolio, the AMD 7-Series chipsets, covering from enthusiast multi-graphics segment to value IGP segment, to replace the AMD 480/570/580 chipsets and AMD 690 series chipsets, marking AMD’s first enthusiast multi-graphics chipset. Discrete graphics chipsets were launched on November 15, 2007 as part of the codenamed ”Spider” desktop platform, and IGP chipsets were launched at a later time in Spring 2008 as part of the codenamed ”Cartwheel” platform.

AMD will also return to the server chipsets market with the next-generation AMD 800S series server chipsets, scheduled to be released in 2009 timeframe.

AMD Live!

AMD LIVE! is a platform marketing initiative focusing the consumer electronics segment, with a recently announced Active TV initiative for streaming Internet videos from web video services such as YouTube, into AMD Live! PC as well as connected digital TVs, together with a scheme for an ecosystem of certified peripherals for the ease of customers to identify peripherals for AMD Live! systems for digital home experience, called “AMD Live! Ready”.

AMD Quad FX platform

The AMD Quad FX platform, being an extreme enthusiast platform, allows two processors to connect through HyperTransport, which is a similar setup to dual-processor (2P) servers, excluding the use of buffered memory/registered memory DIMM modules, and a server motherboard, the current setup includes two Athlon 64 FX-70 series processors and a special motherboard. AMD pushed the platform for the surging demands for what AMD calls “megatasking” for true enthusiasts, the ability to do more tasks on one single system. The platform refreshes with the introduction of Phenom FX processors and the next-generation RD790 chipset, codenamed “”FASN8””.

Commercial platform

The first AMD server/workstation platform after ATI acquisition is scheduled to be released on 2009 timeframe. Codenamed ”Fiorano”, AMD’s first multi-processor server platform after ATI acquisition consists of AMD SR5690 + SP5100 server chipsets, supporting 45 nm, codenamed ”Shanghai” Socket F+ processors and registered DDR2 memory. Future update include the ”Maranello” platform supporting 45 nm, codenamed ”Istanbul”, Socket G34 processors with DDR3 memory. On single-processor platform, the codenamed ”Catalunya” platform consists of codenamed ”Suzuka” 45& nm quad-core processor with AMD SR5580 + SP5100 chipset and DDR3 support.

AMD’s x86 virtualization extension to the 64-bit x86 architecture is named ”AMD Virtualization”, also known by the abbreviation ”AMD-V”, and is sometimes referred to by the code name “Pacifica”. AMD processors using Socket AM2, Socket S1, and Socket F include AMD Virtualization support. AMD Virtualization is also supported by release two (8200, 2200 and 1200 series) of the Opteron processors. The third generation (8300 and 2300 series) of Opteron processors will see an update in virtualization technology, specifically the Rapid Virtualization Indexing (also known by the development name ”Nested Page Tables”), alongside the Tagged TLB and Device Exclusion Vector (DEV).

AMD also promotes the “AMD I/O Virtualization Technology” (also known as IOMMU) for I/O virtualization. The AMD IOMMU specification has been updated to version 1.2. The specification describes the use of a HyperTransport architecture.

AMD’s commercial initiatives include the following:

* AMD Trinity, provides support for virtualization, security and management. Key features include AMD-V technology, codenamed ”Presidio” trusted computing platform technology, I/O Virtualization and Open Management Partition.

* AMD Raiden, future clients similar to the Jack PC to be connected through network to a blade server for central management, to reduce client form factor sizes with AMD Trinity features.

* Torrenza, coprocessors support through interconnects such as HyperTransport, and PCI Express (though more focus was at HyperTransport enabled coprocessors), also opening processor socket architecture to other manufacturers, Sun and IBM are among the supporting consortium, with rumoured POWER7 processors would be socket-compatible to future Opteron processors. The move made rival Intel responded with the open of Front Side Bus (FSB) architecture as well as Geneseo, a collaboration project with IBM for coprocessors connected through PCI Express.

* Various certified systems programs and platforms: AMD Commercial Stable Image Platform (CSIP), together with AMD Validated Server program, AMD True Server Solutions, AMD Thermally Tested Barebones Platforms and AMD Validated Server Program, providing certified systems for business from AMD.

Desktop platforms

Starting in 2007, AMD, following Intel, began using codenames for its desktop platforms such as ”Spider” or ”Dragon”. The platforms, unlike Intel’s approach, will refresh every year, putting focus on platform specialization. The platform includes components as AMD processors, chipsets, ATI graphics and other features, but continued to the open platform approach, and welcome components from other vendors such as VIA, SiS, and Nvidia, as well as wireless product vendors.

Updates to the platform includes the implementation of IOMMU I/O Virtualization with 45 nm generation of processors, and the AMD 800 chipset series in 2009.

Embedded systems

In February 2002, AMD acquired Alchemy Semiconductor for its Alchemy line of MIPS processors for the hand-held and portable media player markets. On June 13, 2006, AMD officially announced that the line was to be transferred to Raza Microelectronics, Inc., a designer of MIPS processors for embedded applications.

In August 2003, AMD also purchased the Geode business which was originally the Cyrix MediaGX from National Semiconductor to augment its existing line of embedded x86 processor products. During the second quarter of 2004, it launched new low-power Geode NX processors based on the K7 Thoroughbred architecture with speeds of fanless processors and , and processor with fan, of TDP 25 W. This technology is used in a variety of embedded systems (Casino slot machines and customer kiosks for instance), several UMPC designs in Asia markets, as well as the OLPC XO-1 computer, an inexpensive laptop computer intended to be distributed to children in developing countries around the world.

For the past couple of years AMD has been introducing 64-bit processors into its embedded product line starting with the AMD Opteron processor. Leveraging the high throughput enabled through HyperTransport and the Direct Connect Architecture these server class processors have been targeted at high end telecom and storage applications. In 2006 AMD added the AMD Athlon, AMD Turion and Mobile AMD Sempron processors to its embedded product line. Leveraging the same 64-bit instruction set and Direct Connect Architecture as the AMD Opteron but at lower power levels, these processors were well suited to a variety of traditional embedded applications. Throughout 2007 and into 2008 AMD has continued to add both single-core Mobile AMD Sempron and AMD Athlon processors and dual-core AMD Athlon X2 and AMD Turion processors to its embedded product line and now offers embedded 64-bit solutions starting with 8W TDP Mobile AMD Sempron and AMD Athlon processors for fan-less designs up to multi-processor systems leveraging multi-core AMD Opteron processors all supporting longer than standard availability.

In April 2007, AMD announced the release of the M690T integrated graphics chipset for embedded designs. This enabled AMD to offer complete processor and chipset solutions targeted at embedded applications requiring high performance 3D and video such as emerging digital signage, kiosk and Point of Sale applications. The M690T was followed by the M690E specifically for embedded applications which removed the TV output, which required Macrovision licensing for OEMs, and enabled native support for dual TMDS outputs, enabling dual independent DVI interfaces.

Flash technology

While less visible to the general public than its CPU business, AMD is also a global leader in flash memory. In 1993, AMD established a 50-50 partnership with Fujitsu called FASL, and merged into a new company called FASL LLC in 2003. The joint venture firm went public under ticker symbol SPSN in December 2005, with AMD shares drop to 37%.

AMD no longer directly participates in the Flash memory devices market now as AMD entered into a non-competition agreement, as of December 21, 2005, with Fujitsu and Spansion, pursuant to which it agreed not to directly or indirectly engage in a business that manufactures or supplies standalone semiconductor devices (including single chip, multiple chip or system devices) containing only Flash memory.

Mobile platforms

AMD started a platform in 2003 aimed at mobile computing, but, with fewer advertisements and promotional schemes, very little was known about the platform. The platform used mobile Athlon 64 or mobile Sempron processors.

As part of the “Better by design” initiative, the open mobile platform, announced February 2007 with announcement of general availability in May 2007, comes together with 65 nm fabrication process Turion 64 X2, and consists of three major components: an AMD processor, graphics from either Nvidia or ATI Technologies which also includes integrated graphics (IGP), and wireless connectivity solutions from Atheros, Broadcom, Marvell, Qualcomm or Realtek.

The ”Puma” platform and Turion Ultra processor was released on June 4, 2008. In the future, AMD plans quad-core processors with 3D graphics capabilities (”Fusion”) to be launched in 2011 as the Sabine/Fusion platform.

Other initiatives

* 50×15, digital inclusion, with targeted 50% of world population to be connected through Internet via affordable computers by the year of 2015.

* The Green Grid, founded by AMD together with other founders, such as IBM, Sun and Microsoft, to seek lower power consumption for grids. Intel was notably absent from the consortium when it was founded, and finally joined in early 2007.

* Codenamed ”SIMFIRE” interoperability testing tool for the Desktop and mobile Architecture for System Hardware (DASH) open architecture.

Software

* Extensions for software parallelism (xSP), aimed at speeding up programs to enable multi-threaded and multi-core processing, announced in Technology Analyst Day 2007. One of the initiatives being discussed since August 2007 is the Light Weight Profiling (LWP), providing internal hardware monitor with runtimes, to observe information about executing process and help the re-design of software to be optimized with multi-core and even multi-threaded programs. Another one is the extension of Streaming SIMD Extension (SSE) instruction set, the SSE5.

* AMD contributes to open source projects, including working with Sun Microsystems to enhance OpenSolaris and Sun xVM on the AMD platform. AMD also maintains its own Open64 compiler distribution and contributes its changes back to the community.

* In 2008, AMD released the low-level programming specifications for its GPUs, and works with the X.Org Foundation to develop drivers for AMD graphics cards.

* Other AMD opensource projects include the AMD Performance Library and the AMD Core Math Library.

Technologies from ATI

After the takeover of ATI, AMD restructured some of the product lineups from both companies. Some products were being rebranded under the AMD brand, including the Imageon for mobile phones and handheld devices, the Xilleon for consumer electronics (digital TV sets), ATI Xpress chipsets (to AMD chipsets) for AMD processors platform and GPGPU computing line-up FireStream, previously known as AMD Stream Processor. Some others retained the use of ATI branding, including the Radeon line of graphics, and chipsets for Intel processors.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Advanced Micro Devices, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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Mac OS X

Mac OS X 10.4 supports the GMA 950, since it was used in previous revisions of the MacBook and 17-inch iMacs. It has been used in all Intel-based Mac minis (until the Mac Mini released on March 3, 2009). Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard contains drivers for the GMA X3100, which were used in a recent revision of the MacBook range.

Late-release versions of Mac OS X 10.4 also support the GMA 900 due to its use in the Apple Developer Transition Kit, which was used in the PowerPC-to-Intel transition. However, special modifications to the kext file must be made to enable Core Image and Quartz Extreme.

Although the new MacBook line no longer uses the X3100, Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) ships with drivers supporting it that require no modifications to the kext file. Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), which includes a new 64-bit kernel in addition to the 32-bit one, does not include 64-bit X3100 drivers. This means that although the MacBooks with the X3100 have 64-bit capable processors and EFI, Mac OS X must load the 32-bit kernel to support the 32-bit X3100 drivers. November 9′s 10.6.2 update ships with 64-bit X3100 drivers.

For a while MacBook and MacBook Pro notebooks instead shipped with a far more powerful NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, and the 15″ and 17″ MacBook Pro notebooks shipped with an additional GeForce 9600GT supporting hybrid power to switch between GPUs. The NVIDIA GeForce 9400M chipset implemented in Apple Macbooks did not support composite or S-video output.

Current (Mid 2010) Macbook Pro Models have an on-board Intel HD (GMA HD) graphics chip as well as a discrete Nvidia 300M series card that supports hybrid power to switch the output.

FreeBSD

FreeBSD 8.0 supports the following Intel graphic chipsets: G945/GME945/G965/Q965/GM965/GL960/GME965/G31/G33/Q33/Q35/G35/G41/G43/G45/Q43/Q45. GMA3150, to date, is unsupported by version 2.7 of the driver which ships with FreeBSD 8.0, 8.1RCs, and 9.0.

Linux

Intel has had a long history of producing or commissioning open source drivers for its graphics chips, with all chipsets (except the GMA& 500) dating back to the i810 having open 2D and 3D drivers for Linux. Intel is the only major graphics hardware vendor to do so. (For an analysis by company see Graphics hardware and FOSS.)

In August 2006, Intel added support to the open-source X.Org/XFree86 drivers for the latest 965 series that include the GMA (X)3000 core. These drivers were developed for Intel by Tungsten Graphics.

In May 2007, version 2.0 of the driver (xorg-video-intel) was released, which added support for the 965GM chipset. In addition, the 2.0 driver added native video mode programming support for all chipsets from i830 forward. This version added support for automatic video mode detection and selection, monitor hot plug, dynamic extended and merged desktops and per-monitor screen rotation. These features are built in to the X.Org 7.3 X server release and will eventually be supported across most of the open source X.Org video drivers. Version 2.1, released in July 2007, added support for the G33, Q33 and Q35 chipsets. G35 is also supported by the Linux driver.

As is common for X.Org drivers on Linux, the license is a combination of GPL (for the Linux kernel parts) and MIT (for all other parts).

The drivers were mainly developed by Intel and Tungsten Graphics (under contract) since the chipsets’ documentation were not publicly available for a long time. In January 2008, Intel released the complete developer documentation for their, at the time, latest chipsets (965 and G35 chipset), allowing for further external developers’ involvement.

In April 2009, Intel released documentation for their newer G45 graphics (including X4500) chipsets.

In May 2009, Intel employee Eric Anholt stated Intel was “still working on getting docs for [8xx] chipsets out.”

intel_hal.so

The driver source contains references to a currently-unavailable binary named “intel_hal.so”. It is entirely optional, and the advantages are not clear; ostensibly they are increased performance and/or additional features. References in the open source code indicate that it contains or contained (at least) Macrovision support and some minor, optional 3D optimization routines. Calls to the Macrovision code inside the binary were later removed from the 2D driver.

GMA 500 on Linux

GMA 500 support on Linux is not optimal. The driver is developed by Tungsten Graphics, not by Intel, and the graphic core is not an Intel one, but is licensed from PowerVR. This has led to an uncertain mix of open and closed source 3d accelerated drivers, instability and lack of support.

Ubuntu is the Linux distribution that best supports GMA500 (Poulsbo), through the use of the ubuntu-mobile and gma500 repositories on Launchpad. Support is present for 8.04, 8.10, 9.04, 9.10 and in an experimental way for 10.04, but the installation procedure is not as simple as other drivers and can lead to many bugs.

Jolicloud, a Linux based OS optimized for netbooks, has a driver for the GMA500 built in.

[http://www.pixielive.org PixieLive], a GNU/Linux live distribution optimized for GMA500 netbooks, it can boot from USB Pendrive, SD Card or HardDisk.

Intel releases official Linux drivers through the IEGD (Intel Embedded Graphic Driver) supporting some Linux distributions dedicated to the embedded market.

GMA500 is capable of running well in Ubuntu with Compiz visual effects activated.

In November 2009, the Linux Foundation released the details of a new, rewritten Linux driver that would support this chipset and Intel’s other upcoming chipsets. The Direct Rendering Manager and X.org parts would be free software, but the 3D component (using Gallium3D) will still be proprietary.

Solaris

Solaris may possibly have support for these chipsets. Scant information can be found on the Opensolaris DRI page.

Microsoft Windows =

GMA 900 on Windows

The GMA 900 is theoretically capable of running Windows Vista’s Aero interface and is certified as DirectX 9 compliant. However, no WHQL certified WDDM driver has been made available. Presumably this is due to the lack of a “hardware scheduler” in the GPU.

Many owners of GMA900 hardware believed they would be able to run Aero on their systems as early release candidates of Vista permitted XDDM drivers to run Aero. Intel, however, contends that Microsoft’s final specs for Aero/WDDM certification did not permit releasing a WDDM driver for GMA900 (due to issues with the hardware scheduler, as mentioned above), so when the final version of Vista was released, no WDDM driver was released. The last minute pulling of OpenGL capabilities from the GMA drivers for Windows Vista left a large number of GMA based workstations unable to perform basic 3D hardware acceleration with OpenGL and unable to run many Vista Premium applications such as Windows DVD Maker. To get OpenGL acceleration, users must use third party drivers, like the freeware [http://TitaniumGL.tk TitaniumGL].

GMA 950 on Windows

This IGP is capable of displaying the Aero interface for Windows Vista. Drivers have shipped with Windows Vista since beta versions were made available in mid-2006. It can also run Windows 7′s Aero interface since Intel released drivers for Windows 7 in mid-June 2009.

The GMA 950 is integrated into many netbooks, such as the Acer Aspire One, and is able to display a resolution up to 2048×1536 at 75 Hz and up to 224 MB of video memory.

Most of the reviews about this IGP were negative, since many games (such as ”Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory” or ”Oblivion”) need both Pixel Shader 2.0 or higher, which the GMA supports, and Vertex Shader 2.0, which is not supported in hardware on the GMA and is software-driven. Other games such as ”Crysis” will run but may not work at frame rates fast enough to make the game playable.

GMA X3000/X3100 on Windows

T&L and Vertex Shaders 3.0 are supported by Intel’s newest 15.6 drivers for Windows Vista as of September 2, 2007. XP support for VS3 and T&L was introduced on August 10, 2007. Intel announced in March 2007 that beta drivers would be available in June 2007.

On June 1, 2007 “pre-beta” (or Early Beta) drivers were released for Windows XP (but not for Vista). Beta drivers for Vista and XP were released on June 19. Since hardware T&L and vertex shading has been enabled in drivers individual applications can be forced to fall back to software rendering, which raises performance and compatibility in certain cases. Selection is based on testing by Intel and preselected in the driver .inf file.

Intel has released production version drivers for [http://downloadfinder.intel.com/scripts-df-external/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=N&ProductID=2576&DwnldID=12415&strOSs=163&OSFullName=Windows%20Vista*&lang=eng 32-bit] and [http://downloadfinder.intel.com/scripts-df-external/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=N&ProductID=2576&DwnldID=12417&strOSs=150&OSFullName=Windows%20Vista*%2064&lang=eng 64-bit] Windows Vista that enable the Aero graphics.

Intel introduced Direct X 10 for the X3100 and X3500 GPUs in the Vista 15.9 drivers, though any release of DX10 drivers for the X3000 is uncertain. WDDM 1.1 is supported by X3100 but DXVA-HD is not.

OpenGL 2.0 support is available since Vista 15.11 drivers and XP 14.36 drivers.

GMA 500 on Windows

As of Apr 2010, latest available driver revisions from the Intel website for Windows XP, Vista and 7 are:

* Version 6.14.11.1018 for Windows XP.

* Version 7.14.10.1006 for Windows Vista.

* Version 5.0.0.2026 for Windows 7.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Intel GMA, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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Some applications require more tweaking than simply installing the application in order to work properly, such as manually configuring Wine to use certain Windows DLLs. The Wine project does not integrate such workarounds into the Wine codebase, instead preferring to focus solely on improving Wine’s implementation of the Windows API. While this approach focuses Wine development on long-term compatibility, it makes it difficult for users to run applications that require workarounds. Consequently, many third party applications have been created to ease the use of those applications that don’t work ”out of the box” within Wine itself. The Wine wiki maintains a page of current and obsolete third party applications.

*”CrossOver”, proprietary software

*”Bordeaux” is a Wine GUI configuration manager that runs winelib applications. It also supports installation of third party utilities, installation of applications and games, and the ability to use custom configurations. Bordeaux currently runs on Linux, FreeBSD, PC-BSD, Solaris, OpenSolaris, and Mac OS X computers.

*”Winetricks” is a small script to install some basic components (typically Microsoft DLLs and fonts) required for some applications to run correctly under Wine. The Wine project will accept bug reports for users of Winetricks, unlike most third-party applications. It is maintained by Wine developer Dan Kegel.

*”Wine-Doors” is an application-management tool for the GNOME desktop which adds functionality to Wine. Wine-Doors is an alternative to WineTools which aims to improve upon WineTools’ features and extend on the original idea with a more modern design approach.

*”IEs4Linux” is a utility to install all versions of Internet Explorer, including versions 4 to 6 and version 7 (in beta).

*”[http://www.playonlinux.com/ PlayOnLinux]” is an application to ease the installation of Windows applications (primarily games) using Wine. It uses an online database of scripts to apply to different applications that need special configuration; if the game is not in the database, a manual installation can be performed. Aside from games, any other program can be installed and each one is put in a different container (WINEPREFIX) to prevent interference of one program with another. This provides isolation in much the same way that CrossOver’s bottles work. PlayOnLinux allows users to install some of most favorable applications in the Windows world, such as Apple iTunes and Safari, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Internet Explorer v. 6/7, AutoCAD, Mono, .NET Framework 2.0, Fireworks MX, Flash MX, and many others.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Wine (software), under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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Normal DVD(Video) authoring software usually does not support DVD-Audio creation, so there is some special software:

Macintosh

* Sonic Solutions DVD Creator AV& – The first DVD-Audio authoring solution available. A spin off of the popular high end DVD Video authoring package. It allows DVD-Audio authoring at the command line level only. Still widely used but no longer sold or supported by Sonic Solutions.

* Sonic Studio SonicStudio HD& – Macintosh based tool used for High Density audio mastering and to prepare audio for DVD-A authoring in One Click DVD.

* Sonic Studio

* Sonic OneClick DVD& – Converts prepared Sonic Studio EDLs into binary MLP files to be used in the authoring tool. Also generates scriptFile information to be added to DVD Creator AV projects.

* DVD audio Tools: console application dvda-author (version 08.07), see below.

* Apple Logic Pro 8 – When bouncing, choose “CDDA” under destination, and then choose DVD-A from the popup menu.

* Minnetonka discWelder Bronze is now available for Macintosh. Very simple to use if you just want to burn your own files to listen to in this format.

* [http://burn-osx.sourceforge.net/Pages/English/home.html Burn] General purpose CD and DVD burning utility that can write AUDIO_TS data. Select “Audio” tab then “DVD-Audio” from the drop-down menu.

Windows

* [http://www.cirlinca.com Cirlinca DVD-AUDIO Solo]

* Steinberg WaveLab [http://www.steinberg.net/en/home.html Steinberg]

* DigiOn Audio 2 [http://www.digion.com/index.htm.en DigiOn]

* Gear Pro Mastering Edition [http://www.gearsoftware.com/pro-mastering.cfm Gear Pro Mastering Edition]

* DVD audio tools package (see below).

* Samplitude

Linux

* A project called [http://dvd-audio.sourceforge.net DVD audio Tools] provides free/open source DVD-Audio authoring tools for Linux and other *nix platforms (FreeBSD, OpenSolaris,…).

Windows (console application) binaries are also available. DVD-Audio/Video discs (aka Hybrid or Universal DVDs) are also supported.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article DVD-Audio, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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* AIMP2 for Windows

* Amarok for KDE: Native Replay Gain support was added in Amarok 2.1. . No native support is available for Amarok 1, but a [http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=26073 Replay Gain script] is available for Amarok’s script manager. As it is an external script, however, there will be a slight lag between the start of a track and the volume adjustment. This is particularly noticeable when a track starts with a peak loudness.

* Audacious for Unix-like systems

* Aqualung for Linux and Windows

* Banshee for Linux

* cmus for Unix-like systems

* [http://deadbeef.sourceforge.net/ DeaDBeeF] for GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenSolaris

* Exaile for Linux/GNOME

* FLAC: The reference FLAC decoder can create a new copy with Replay Gain applied, through the undocumented option –apply-replaygain-which-is-not-lossless as of version 1.1.1

* foobar2000 for Windows

* [http://squentin.free.fr/gmusicbrowser/gmusicbrowser.html GMusicBrowser] for Linux/GNOME

* [http://www.musicex.com/mediacenter/ J.River Media Center] for Windows

* [http://www.zortam.com/ Zortam Mp3 Media Studio] for Windows

* MediaMonkey for Windows

* madplay

* Mpg123 supported for only Xing/Lame/Info header

* MPD for Unix-like systems

* Muine music player for GNOME

* MusicBee for Windows

* [http://sbooth.org/Play/ Play] for Mac OS X

* [http://www.conduits.com/products/player/ Pocket Player] for Windows Mobile, through the use of [http://www.conduits.com/products/player/plugins.asp Replay Gain DSP plugin], by Conduits

* Quod Libet for Unix-like systems

* QuuxPlayer for Windows

* Rhythmbox for GNOME (through the ReplayGain plug-in)

* Songbird: for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux

* SoX Cross-platform (Windows, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, et al.)

* Squeezebox (2 and newer) hardware and accompanying SlimServer/SqueezeCenter software from Slim Devices

* VLC media player a multi platform media player

* Winamp for Windows

* XBMC for Xbox

* XMMS for Unix-like systems with X11 (supports Replay Gain for Vorbis; for MP3 files, a patched version of the xmms-mad plugin which only supports APEv2 is available.)

* XMMS2 for Unix-like systems

* XMPlay for Windows

* [http://www.stigc.dk/projects/JavaTunes/ JavaTunes] for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X

* [http://www.gasteropod.net/ Cue Broadcast Audio Player] for Windows (Freeware)

* [http://www.gasteropod.net/ hunisPRO automation system] for Windows

* [http://www.proppfrexx.radio42.com/ ProppFrexx ONAIR] for Windows

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Replay Gain, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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Traditionally, StarOffice licenses sold for around US$70, but in 2004, Sun planned to offer subscription-based licenses to Japanese customers for about 1,980 JPY (17 USD) per year (Becker, 2004). P. Ulander, a desktop products manager for Sun, acknowledged that Sun planned to expand subscription-based licenses to other countries as well. Sun’s website offered StarOffice for US$34.95.

Sun used a per-person license for StarOffice, compared to the per-device licenses used for most other proprietary software. An individual purchaser gains the right to install the software on up to five computers. For example, a small-business owner can have the software on laptop, office and home computers, or a user with a computer running Microsoft Windows, and another running Linux, can install StarOffice on both computers.

StarOffice 9 Software is no longer offered at no-charge to education customers. Education users can use OpenOffice.org 3.0, which has the same functionality as StarOffice 9 Software, or continue using StarOffice 8 Software, which remains no-charge. Sun also offered free web-based training and an online tutorial for students and teachers, free support services for teachers (including educational templates for StarOffice) and significantly discounted technical support for schools.

From August 2007

to November 2008, Google offered StarOffice 8 as part of its free downloadable Google Pack application.

Users of the Solaris 11 Express Community Edition receive StarOffice 9 for free along with the operating system. OpenSolaris users who register their OS with Sun have the ability to download the Express Community Edition for free.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Oracle Open Office, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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* Capacity expansion is normally achieved by adding groups of disks as a top-level vdev: simple device, RAID-Z, RAID-Z2, RAID-Z3, or mirrored. Newly written data will dynamically start to use all available vdevs. It is also possible to expand the array by iteratively swapping each drive in the array with a bigger drive and waiting for ZFS to heal itself — the heal time will depend on amount of stored information, not the disk size. The new free space will not be available until all the disks have been swapped.

* It is currently not possible to reduce the number of top-level vdevs in a pool nor otherwise reduce pool capacity. This functionality was said to be in development already in 2007. It is not available as of Solaris 10 10/09 (AKA update 8).

* It is not possible to add a disk as a column to a RAID-Z, RAID-Z2, or RAID-Z3 vdev. This feature depends on the block pointer rewrite functionality due to be added soon. You can however create a new RAID-Z vdev and add it to the zpool.

* Vdevs cannot be nested, so a mirror or RAID-Z top-level vdev can only contain files or disks. Mirrors of mirrors (or other combinations) are not allowed.

* Reconfiguring the number of top-level vdev requires copying data offline, destroying the pool, and recreating the pool with the new top-level vdev configuration.

* ZFS is not a native cluster, distributed, or parallel file system and cannot provide concurrent access from multiple hosts as ZFS is a local file system. Sun’s Lustre distributed filesystem will adapt ZFS as back-end storage for both data and metadata in version 3.0, which is scheduled to be released in 2010.

* ZFS expects a disk cache flush command to commit cached data to media. Some virtualization software are configured by default to ignore cache flush commands, and some consumer-grade hardware ‘lies’ about actually executing the command as well. For example, VirtualBox can be, but is not by default configured to properly respect cache flushes (configuration would be using the procedure described in section 11.1.3 Responding to guest IDE flush requests of the Sun VirtualBox User Manual); consumer grade USB disk enclosures are said to be particularly vulnerable to this problem. In the event of an outage or fault this can quite possibly lead to damage to the pool; recovery can be attempted by importing the pool as of few transactions ago (i.e. an older uberblock), losing minutes/seconds of data. Recovery enhancement is expect to be integrated in Q1 2010 (already in the latest development versions of OpenSolaris). A scrub is used to verify the integrity; however, some files may still need to be restored from backups, in the unlikely event they have already been deleted, blocks freed and then overwritten.

* ZFS has no defragmentation utility. Usage of COW with often changed files leads to high fragmentation.

* “Copies” are not the same thing as “replicas” for purposes of data recovery, which can lead to permanent data loss.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article ZFS, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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*WebDrive: A commercial filesystem implementing WebDAV, SFTP, FTP, FTPS and Amazon S3

*Transmit: A commercial FTP client that also adds the ability to mount WebDAV, SFTP, FTP and Amazon S3 servers as disks in Finder, via [http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/ MacFUSE].

*ExpanDrive: A commercial filesystem implementing SFTP/FTP/FTPS using FUSE

*GlusterFS: Clustered Distributed Filesystem having capability to scale up to several petabytes.

*SSHFS: Provides access to a remote filesystem through SSH

*FTPFS

*GmailFS: Filesystem which stores data as mail in Gmail

*GAEDrive: A Network Storage based on Google App Engine

*EncFS: Encrypted virtual filesystem

*NTFS-3G and Captive NTFS, allowing access to NTFS filesystems

*WikipediaFS : View and edit Wikipedia articles as if they were real files

*Sun Microsystems’s Lustre cluster filesystem will use FUSE to allow it to run in userspace, so that a FreeBSD port is possible. However, the ZFS-Linux port of Lustre will be running ZFS’s DMU (Data Management Unit) in userspace.

*archivemount

*RUNZ files are mounted with the help of FUSE, to allow portable apps to run on Super OS

* LoggedFS [http://loggedfs.sourceforge.net/]: Logging of file system access

*HDFS: [http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/MountableHDFS FUSE bindings] exist for the open source Hadoop distributed filesystem.

*mtpfs: mounting MTP devices like Creative Zen music players

*Sector File System: Sector is a distributed file system designed for large amount of commodity computers. Sector uses FUSE to provide a mountable local file system interface.

*CurlFtpFS Filesystem to access FTP/SFTP locations.

*[http://sourceforge.net/projects/fuse-ext2/ fuse-ext2] An open source ext2/ext3 file system. (Supports Mac OS X 10.4 and later (Universal Binary), using [http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/ MacFuse])

* [http://www.lessfs.com/ Lessfs]: inline data de-duplicating filesystem for Linux that includes support for lzo or QuickLZ compression and encryption.

*CloudStore (formerly, Kosmos filesystem): By mounting via FUSE, existing Linux utilities can interface with CloudStore.

*MooseFS: An open source distributed fault-tolerant file system available on every OS with FUSE implementation (Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenSolaris, MacOS X), capable of storing petabytes of data spread over several servers visible as one resource.

*NagusFS: Filesystem representation of Nagios services.

*CassandraFS (https://code.launchpad.net/cassandrafs): Filesystem over Cassandra (cassandra.apache.org).

*ZFS: [http://zfs-fuse.net/ ZFS-Fuse-Linux implementation]

*fuse-zip: [http://code.google.com/p/fuse-zip/ Allows to use zip files as a filesystem (supports writing)]

*OWFS [http://www.owfs.org] One-Wire File System giving access to 1-Wire devices via a file system directory structure.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Filesystem in Userspace, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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The Rock processor slots into the code-named Supernova line. Details of the server specifications were released into OpenSolaris Architecture Review

Physical resources

The Physical Resource Inventory (PRI) of the ARC 2008/761 indicates the Supernova platforms will support: IEEE 1275 OpenFirmware, platform virtualization through Logical Domains (LDOM), independent system controller (SC), and Fault Management Architecture (FMA) Domain Services. The FMA feature was originally referenced to FWARC/2006/141, but this was closed and extended in FWARC/2008/455 “to successfully diagnose PCI fabric errors that occur in root domains.”

Input/output description

The iodevice Machine Description (MD) Node Specification of ARC 2008/761 indicates support for both PCI Express (PCIe) hot-pluggable slots as well as a bridge to older PCI eXtended (PCI-X)).

Input/output expandability

Hitendra Zhangada described a variety of PCIe parameters in software which support the hardware platforms. Bronze servers would support PCIe slots 0-5. Silver servers would support I/O boards 0-1 and PCIe slots 0-7 for each board. Platinum servers support I/O boards 0-3 and PCIe slots 0-7 for each board. Silver-II servers support PCIe slots 00-19. Platinum-II servers support boards 0-7 and slots 0-3 for each board.

Common features

Hitendra Zhangada, SPS Common SW Features Engineering, at Software Group, Sun Microsystems, Inc. wrote an email on December 9 in 2008 sponsoring a fast-track software ARC case describing Supernova platforms AT480 and AT880. Ravi Subbarao of Sun Microsystems, Director of Enterprise Systems Software, sponsored ARC 2008/761. The email described platforms bindings and interface changes: in MD, PRI and OpenBoot device node.

AT7180

There is a speculated SPARC Enterprise AT7180, as a single socket model. It is a future model speculated to handle as many as 32 hardware threads.

AT7280

There is a speculated SPARC Enterprise AT7280, as a dual socket model. It is a future model speculated to handle as many as 64 hardware threads.

AT7480

The Supernova Silver-II model received the name SPARC Enterprise AT7480 is a quad socket model. It is a future model reported to handle as many as 128 hardware threads. The AT7480 is based upon the PCI Express bus architecture with an OpenFirmware.

AT7880

The Supernova Platinum-II, an octal socket model, received the name SPARC Enterprise AT7880. It is a future model reported to handle as many as 256 hardware threads. The AT7880 is based upon the PCI Express bus architecture with an OpenBoot firmware. Pingchung Lee, Responsible Engineer for ARC 2008/761 explains in a December 10 email in 2008 that the AT7880 has eight individual CPU boards and each CPU board has one Sun Neptune multithreaded 10 Gigabit Ethernet chip on-board.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Rock (processor), under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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