OS business meeting/
buildable source code panel

Customer OS feature request process

Prior to CUG, Bill Middlecamp from Cray Research solicited inputs from various customer sites on a customer operating system feature request process. At this meeting, he discussed a new prototype for the process. He indicated that as the process is new, Cray wants to start small and evolve it as makes sense. I sensed that their intent here is to do better at resolving and responding to customers' design SPRs.

Bill is available via e-mail (wjm@cray.com). His presentation will also be available on CRInform.

OS year 2000 date standard

Cray Research does have a YR2000 plan. It's contained on the Cray Web page at http://www.cray.com/PUBLIC/YEAR_2000. The project leader at Cray is Kent Koeninger.

Buildable source code panel discussion

This was a much-awaited discussion, as over the last three years, there has been a great deal of debate and concern over the future policy of Silicon Graphics/Cray Research governing the release of operating system source code. Past meetings on this subject with Cray have been strained.

The SGI/Cray Research panel was comprised of four people:

• Mike Booth, vice president of Software and Applications, Cray Research

• Don Mason, Software project manager, Cray Research

• Dave Wallace, head of the UNICOS kernel group, Cray Research

• Rich Altmaier, director of System Software, Silicon Graphics

Don Mason gave a short presentation showing the various questions and concerns submitted by CUG members prior to the meeting. He followed with the SGI/Cray Research policy for source code releases.

Big surprise for all of us: SGI and Cray Research will continue to support buildable source code releases to current sites receiving it today, and in addition, extend the same support for the J90, T3E, and SGI/IRIX high-end (i.e., Origin2000) sites. The SGI/IRIX source release will be targeted for IRIX 6.5 by 4Q97.

The SGI/IRIX Origin2000 sites in attendance all seemed very pleased, and I sensed that all other attendees were extremely pleased with the outcome as well.

The only point in contention was binary vs. source code bug fix patches. Members requested that these be released in source code form. SGI/Cray Research indicated they would seriously consider doing this.