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Solaris 10 & Hardware Support

807559Nov 21 2004 — edited Dec 1 2004
I understand that Linux depends on the communities support to develop drivers for hardware that isn't supported by the manufacturer. How does Solaris stand with support from manufactures, and support from Sun or popular manufactures. I'd like to install Solaris 10 on my x86 desktop, but if it can't support my nForce video chip then there isn't much of a question that I would stick with Linux.

Is it possible, specifically for an nForce video chip, to get just video that doesn't necessarily take advantage of graphic acceleration?

Since nVidia is partnered with Sun to bring some of their high-end cards to Solaris, should we expect to see some of their other hardware supported also?

I'm curious about other hardware as well, such as Ethernet cards, or sound cards. Is it really feasable to run Solaris on a desktop PC, or does it need to be dedicated Solaris machine that was built from the ground up with support in mind because supported hardware is so scarce?

Comments

807559
The answer isn't easy to find, because the breadth of the
problem is wide.

As I write, I'm on an Athlon-64 running a NVidia nForce3
250 Gb chipset. Does it work? Yes. Does everything work?
No. There are some parts of the chipset which don't have
Solaris drivers yet. Unfortunately, NVidia also keeps their
driver source close and even for Linux they don't release
the source code. In my case, neither the network nor audio
drivers are available. It may be difficult to get the Solaris drivers
ported unless NVidia does the work. AFAICT, that is not
part of the Sun/NVidia announcement, though I'd be happy
to be proved wrong.

A number of sound cards do have drivers. On this machine,
the NVidia audio driver is not recognized, but I have an iMic
USB audio dongle that seems to work well.

For Ethernet, I have an old Rhine-based card (D-Link). A
driver for this, including the needed 64-bit amd64 driver :-),
is a available from
http://homepage2.nifty.com/mrym3/taiyodo/eng/

Some other vendors offer Solaris drivers directly, so you'll
find some have more support than others.
-- richard
807559
I should also mention that Solaris 10 uses the X.org
x-server which has a wide variety of supported drivers.
In my current case, a ATI-9200 SE seems to work the
same as on later Linux distros.
-- richard
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Post Details

Locked on Dec 29 2004
Added on Nov 21 2004
#oracle-solaris, #solaris-on-x86
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