The subject of the sentence, and the point of the whole paragraph,
is that I think it would be nice if we got along with Sun as well
as we seem to with Digital.
I think one of the Sparc port's greatest assets, and why it turned out
so well, is because Sun was not involved at all.
This seems to say that we "Don't need no steenking Sun Engineers to
help us!" :) If that's the case, fine. I wasn't suggesting we
did. The fact that Sun does not seem to be forthcoming, as Digital
is reputed to be, is merely an illustration of the relationship.
Digital has reason to be forthcoming, they have low market share and
low margin (check out their recent layoff, that isn't because the last
few quarters were killer ;-). If I was them I'd be looking for
something to boost up my sales and make me look good too. Sun has
tons of market share, they have zero incentive (as a company) to give
too much of a hoot about something like Linux.
They might give it some looks over now, because it eats Solaris for
lunch performance wise, in many respects. But this is because Linux
is already here on the Sparc. And not having documentation for
hardware has been an issue for the entire Sparc port, it didn't effect
us at all, just made the work a little more drudgy, but didn't prevent
it from happening in an expediant fashion. The drivers were written,
the port came to be, without documentation for many things. ;-)
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Yow! 233 microsecond remote host TCP latency ---- beat that
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David S. Miller, dm@engr.sgi.com /_____________/ / // /_/ ><