Kernel hacker and developer on the sparc port, David S. Miller announced he has Linux booting on Sun's new UltraSparc T1 "Niagara". Dave published a bootlog on his site, showing the kernel recognizing a 32-way SMP system. (Niagara is made of up to eight cores, each able to handle four separate threads. Linux thus sees a 32-processor system.)

This came as good news to Sun who has been campaigning to get more attention away from Intel's Itanium and IBM's Power processors and onto their own Sparc line.
Sun has announced that it's releasing the UltraSparc T1 chip design under the General Public License.

The kernel almost booting on the T1 is merely a first step. Much more is still to be done to make the kernel usable. Miller hopes to have Linux working at basic interaction level by mid-February and have a "reasonably stable" version by mid-summer (northern hemisphere). "Most of the sparc64 port is up to snuff," he said, but "As with any significant new platform, some non-trivial changes are needed."

Some are skeptical of the business advancement brought by this to Sun. The two top Linux vendors, Red Hat and Novell seem to have no plan to resurrect their Sparc versions.