μblog: engineering from the trenches

Jonathan Schwartz recently made a post in his blog about Sun entering the “commodity silicon” market. He also mentioned that the design for the UltraSparc T2 (Niagara 2) will be released to the open source community under the GPL. Although this is a step in a good direction, there are some potential dangers. The key to success in such a strategy is to provide a truly good product since everybody can see the details of the design. It would be unfortunate if there was some bug which allowed privilege escalation at a hardware level (remember having to run the older UltraSparcs in 32-bit mode to prevent some security problems?). Over all, this move puts Sun in a stronger position and I hope they do well. I can’t wait to see the actual design files.

del.icio.us | digg