Re: Sun Ray1 support?

[Erik Fair <fair%netbsd.org@localhost>]

The impression I had was that the SunRays were both simple (they're terminals 
with basically little smarts of their own, i.e. a small CPU, a GPU, and 
keyboard/mouse), and locked down pretty tight (as in, will not boot/run 
anything other than a properly crypto-signed binary from Sun), intended to have 
a pretty much dedicated private ethernet into a big honking Sun server to bound 
latency and make performance guarantees. A latter-day version of an X terminal, 
if you will.

Hmm, the Wikipedia article confirms some of that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray

and it also says that the SunRay 2 is based on a MIPS CPU:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemy_(processor)

NetBSD appears to have support for these CPUs, so getting a kernel up starts 
with figuring out what the SunRay firmware wants to see.

http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/desktop-workstations/036088.pdf

It's not even clear to me that these things boot an OS (or whatever passes for 
its OS) from the network - it might have all it needs in Flash PROM, and just 
DHCPs to get an IP address and other stuff it needs to hook up to the server.

        Erik <fair%netbsd.org@localhost>