Sun people at the Sun User ’91 show in Birmingham last week, including distinguished engineer Robert Gingell took exception to a remark in last week’s edition of Unigram.X, which said there will be no one generic version of Solaris for the Sparc. However, at the UK announcement of the operating environment, SunSoft’s Allan Snell made it clear, several times, that there would be different implementations for at least the Fujitsu Ltd and Tera Microsystems Inc Sparc CPU sets. Sun was unable to tell us definitively whether there would have to be others for the rest of the half-a-dozen or so Sparc chip sets. However, Gingell made it clear that the binary version of Solaris is unchanged, regardless of the Sparc version on which it runs, and there would likely have to be some tweaking for the different floating-point and memory management features of the various Sparcs, just as there are different device drivers for the range of attached peripherals: it doesn’t have to mean different versions of Solaris.
